Cult Movie Reviews

Nightmare Castle (1965)

2012-01-30T22:28:00.008+11:00

In the last few years we have finally seen decent DVD releases of some of Barbara Steele’s best horror films (although sadly so far no sign of the wonderful Riccardo Freda flick The Terrible Dr Hichcock). Severin’s 2009 release of Nightmare Castle (Amanti d'oltretomba) is particularly notable.

Barbara Steele is Muriel Arrowsmith and she’s married to a 19th century mad scientist, Dr Stephen Arrowsmith. An evil mad scientist. And she knows he’s mad and evil. Sadly she doesn’t know just how evil.

She has taken a lover, the hunky David. When Stephen catches them in flagrante delicto his reaction is perhaps just a trifle excessive. He tortures them both to death.

Unfortunately for Stephen he doesn’t actually own Hampton Castle. Muriel owned it, and now it has passed to her insane sister Jenny (also played by Barbara Steele). This doesn’t suit Stephen or his girlfriend Solange (Helga Liné) but Stephen has a plan. Jenny’s madness should make it easy to gain control of Muriel’s estate. In fact an even better solution presents itself once he meets the blonde bombshell Jenny (yes, Barbara Steele is a blonde for most of this movie) and sees that she’s rather a dish. This solution does not met with Solange’s approval.

Solange is in fact a old woman but being a mad scientist Stephen has restored her youth and beauty, by means of the blood of his ex-wife. This might not turn out to be a permanent restoration of her youth however, which makes her even more hostile to the exotic beauty Jenny.

Stephen and Solange still plan on making use of Jenny’s madness to make sure of their control of the estate, and they call in her old psychiatrist, Dr Dereck Joyce. Dr Joyce is charming and good-looking and seems to take a lightly greater interest in Jenny than is strictly necessary on medical grounds.

Stephen does face one unexpected problem. Jenny had certainly had a breakdown a few years earlier but she is now perfectly sane.

He still believes he can drive her insane and get what he wants but there’s been a worrying development. Muriel’s tomb is empty. He knows she’s dead, but will that stop her revenge?

One of the many good things about this movie is that the English version (the only one on the DVD) features Barbara Steele’s own voice, offering us a rare opportunity to give a true judgment on her acting abilities. This is one of her best roles. Paul Muller, as always, makes a delightfully sinister villain.

As director Mario Caiano explains in the accompanying interview much of the distinctive look of the movie was entirely fortuitous. With a very short shooting schedule and very little money there was no chance for cinematographer Enzo Barboni to do complex lighting setups. So mostly he just put a single 5000 watt light up high in a corner. The result is stark shadow that really enhance the atmosphere. A great example of the ability of good low-budget film-makers to make a virtue out of a necessity.

The extras include two interviews. The first is with Barbara Steele. In her early seventies she is still feisty, fiery, intelligent, amusing and rather charming. What’s especially pleasing is that she feels no need to apologise for her horror films and actually seems quite proud of them. She has some generous things to say about the various horror directors she worked with, including Mario Bava, Antonio Margheriti, Riccardo Freda and Roger Corman. And she has some amusing anecdotes about the unpredictable and wildly eccentric Freda (whom she obviously admired) and of course about Fellini (for whom she worked on 8½). She’s also very generous in her comments about her fans and is delighted that she still receives 40 fan letters a week.

The second interview is with director Mario Caiano, a rather genial character who remembers the movie fondly.

The major highlight of this DVD though is the transfer - widescreen, uncut and looking splendid. A vast improvement on previous DVD releases of this film.

Nightmare Castle might not be a masterpiece but it’s a fine gothic chiller with psychological overtones and a very enjoyable horror movie.

She-Wolf of London (1946)

2012-01-28T01:48:00.006+11:00

If you were going to teach a course in how not to make a horror movie She-Wolf of London would be the ideal teaching aid. This 1946 Universal clunker ticks just about all the bad movie boxes.

Few things are more annoying than a horror movie that turns out not to be a horror movie because there aren’t really any supernatural elements, it’s really just a murder mystery. But there is one thing more annoying - a movie of that type where it’s obvious from the start that there’s not really anything supernatural happening. And there’s one thing that is worse still - a movie of that type where the solution to the murder mystery is painfully obvious right from the start. And that’s She-Wolf of London.

And this movie’s problems don’t end there, as we shall see.

Phyllis Allenby (June Lockhart) is an heiress who lives with her aunt and her cousin in London around 1900. Only they’re not really her aunt and her cousin. Aunt Martha (Sara Haden) was her father’s housekeeper. After Phyllis’s parents died Aunt Martha and her daughter Carol (Jan Wiley) continued living in the house although Phyllis still thinks they’re her relatives.

Unfortunately we’re told all this right at the start, an example of extraordinarily clumsy and inept writing, because the only hope of maintaining any suspense would have been to keep this knowledge from the audience.

Phyllis is engaged to Barry Lanfield (Don Porter), a wealthy young professional type. Phyllis is rather hesitant about the marriage though, on account of the Allenby Curse. We’re never told very much about the Allenby Curse except that it apparently involves lycanthropy. As a result Phyllis fears that she may be a werewolf. When she wakes up in the morning with mud caked on her shoes and blood stains and doesn’t remember anything she becomes more convinced she must indeed be a werewolf. In fact she believes she’s responsible for several recent attacks in the nearby park, attacks that were blamed on dogs.

Detective Latham from Scotland Yard has no doubt that a werewolf was responsible, although there’s little evidence to suggest such an outlandish explanation. Barry Lanfield on the other hand is certain that Phyllis could not possibly be a werewolf and he starts investigating the case privately.

I won’t reveal anything further but really the solution to the mystery has already been revealed through some very ham-fisted plotting.

Apart from its other deficiencies She-Wolf of London suffers from some unfortunate casting choices. No audience is ever going to believe for one moment that Phyllis is really a werewolf - she’s much too insipid and too timid. There are other casting problems as well, especially Sara Haden as Aunt Martha, but since I try not to reveal spoilers I won’t say any more about her. Lloyd Corrigan as Detective Latham is essentially comic relief and he’s not too bad. Don Porter is an adequate and reasonably likeable hero.

George Bricker wrote the screenplay and is therefore largely responsible for this movie’s utter failure. The terrible script combined with the badly miscast female lead really gave director Jean Yarbrough nothing to work with. It’s actually a reasonably well-made movie. Production values are quite high for what was very much a B-movie and there are some effectively atmospheric moments. The scenes in the mist-shrouded park are the kinds of wonderfully artificial scenes, obviously done on a sound stage, that I find to be for me are one of the more enjoyable features of the Universal horror movies of this era. It’s a very bad movie, but it’s a good-looking bad movie.

It’s part of Universal’s Wolf Man Legacy DVD set and the transfer is extremely good. There are no extras, Universal possibly feeling that the less said about this one the better!

Solomon Kane (2009)

2012-01-25T13:00:00.008+11:00

Being a fan of Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane stories I have been very reluctant to see the 2009 Solomon Kane movie. I did not believe that any modern film-maker could, or would, do them justice. I’m now delighted to be able to say that I was wrong.

The movie is not actually based on the stories themselves. It is an origins tale. It is however based on Robert E. Howard’s character and it is a genuine attempt to get the character right.

The movie opens with Kane as a pirate plundering a castle and as a result being damned. Kane returns to England and takes refuge in a monastery and renounces violence, believing this to be his only hope, even if it’s a slender hope, of salvation. He is forced to leave the monastery after the Father Superior has a vision that tells him that Kane’s destiny lies elsewhere.

He meets a Puritan family on the road and is invited to journey with them. William Crowthorn and his wife and their two children Samuel and Meredith are hoping to go to the New World to make a new start. It soon becomes apparent that things are going very wrong in England. Bands of raiders roam the country, burning and pillaging and murdering. We will later find out that the raiders are servants of the evil sorcerer Malachi.

Kane and his companions on the road encounter one of these bands, with disastrous consequences. William Crowthorn is killed. Meredith is carried off by the marauders.

Kane is now a man of peace and is unable to defend his companions. He now faces a terrible choice. To save Meredith he will have to take up the sword again, and in doing do he will risk the near certainty of eternal damnation. It’s a risk he is willing to take.

This is not a conventional action movie and it’s most certainly not a comic book movie. It’s unconventional nature seems to have frightened distributors and it failed to get a proper commercial release. It’s been generally written off as a commercial flop but if writer-director Michael J. Bassett is correct in his claims that the often-quoted $45 million budget was wildly exaggerated it may end up turning a profit through DVD sales. Bassett apparently doesn’t mind that it didn’t get its chances in the movie theatres - he’s hoping for a Blu-Ray release which he feels (probably correctly) is the best way for this film to reach an audience.

It’s also been much criticised by Robert E. Howard fans for supposedly having little to do with either Robert E. Howard’s stories or his character. That’s actually rather unfair. Bassett had hoped to use tis movie as a springboard for a series of later films that would have been based on Howard’s actual stories. More importantly, I think the movie does set up the character rather well and I think it does capture most of the qualities that make Solomon Kane very different from other sword-and-sorcery heroes.

Solomon Kane is a man to whom damnation and salvation are very real. He inhabits a world very different to our own. It is not a world of moral relativism. It is a world in which good and evil, Heaven and Hell, damnation and salvation, God and Satan, are not merely realities, they are the only realities that really matter. It is also a world in which the Christian religion matters. You cannot make a movie about Solomon Kane while indulging in fashionable anti-Christian polemics, and to his credit Michael J. Bassett understood this. He also understood that there could be no place for political correctness in such a movie - apart from anything else such concepts would have been hopelessly anachronistic.

He also deserves credit for taking his subject matter seriously. In an interview included on the DVD (and even if you don’t normally bother with DVD extras you really should watch this interview) he makes it clear that his intention was to avoid any hint of a tongue-in-cheek or camp approach. James Purefoy, who plays the title role, also deserves credit for playing the title role absolutely straight. Solomon Kane is a gloomy, tortured, utterly humourless man and any attempt to play him any other way would have made him just another generic action hero. Of course it’s likely that the movie would have done better commercially had it been approached as just another dumb action movie, so what we have here is something you don’t see very often these days in the movie world - artistic integrity.

Also noteworthy is the refusal to make Meredith a love interest. Kane’s feelings towards her are, as Bassett notes, much closer in spirit to courtly love than to romantic love. Kane is a Puritan after all. He doesn’t set out to rescue the girl because he expects to move in with her afterwards. He does it because he is fundamentally, in spite of the evil he has done in the past, a godly man and it is his duty. It is also the only way he can save his soul.

The movie also manages to avoid being transgressive or subversive, and that’s always something to be thankful for.

I’ve probably made the film sound terribly serious and dull but while it attempts to be more than an action movie it also succeeds in being a thoroughly entertaining and exciting action movie. If it’s sword fights and monsters and mayhem you want they’re there in abundance.

Visually it’s very impressive. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve as far as visual style is concerned then all the CGI in the world isn’t going to help you. Fortunately in this case the film-makers do have a coherent vision and despite some budgetary constraints it looks splendid.

While Robert E. Howard purists might not be satisfied this film is certainly closer in spirit to Howard’s writings than I would have expected. It’s an intelligent action movie, a very rare beast indeed.

Werewolf of London (1935)

2012-01-22T19:52:00.006+11:00

Werewolf of London was Universal’s first attempt at a werewolf movie, in 1935. I believe it was not quite the first ever werewolf movie but it was the movie that first presented the werewolf to movie audiences in a fully developed form.

Universal had planned an earlier werewolf film that never got off the ground.

What makes Werewolf of London so interesting is that most of what we think of as werewolf lore was invented by Curt Siodmak in his screenplay for Universal’s 1941 classic The Wolf Man. Werewolf of London presents us with an earlier and slightly different kind of werewolf lore.

Dr Wildred Glennon (Henry Hull) is an English botanist who travels to Tibet in search of an unusual and exceedingly rare plant, the Mariphasa lupino lumino. He is attacked by a mysterious and rather beast-like figure but escapes with nothing more serious than a few cuts.

Back in England he sets to work to study this strange plant. He has built an extraordinary device that mimics the light of the moon and this is going to prove essential since the Mariphasa only blooms in moonlight. He receives a visit from the enigmatic Dr Yogami (Warner Oland) who spins him an outlandish tale of werewolves. Dr Yogami claims that the juice of the Mariphasa plant is the only antidote to a condition known as lycanthrophobia and warns Glennon that two souls are in mortal peril if he is not prepared to share the Mariphasa plant with him. Glennon dismisses all this as nonsense.

Soon however Glennon makes the unpleasant discovery that Yogami’s story might be true after all, and finds that he is indeed turning into a werewolf. The mysterious figure that attacked him in Tibet had been Yogami, and Yogami has now infected Glennon with the lycanthrophobia from which he himself suffers.

Unfortunately the only three blooms of the Mariphasa have been stolen from his laboratory. He remembers Dr Yogami’s warning that the werewolf instinctively seeks to kill that which it most loves, and Glennon fears for the safety of his wife Lisa.

A series of murders now sweeps London, with the victims showing signs of having been mauled by a wild animal. Dr Glennon strives desperately to find a way to escape his fate and to save Lisa but it may be too late.

It has been suggested that this film represents a lost opportunity, and that with a better director and a better cast it could have been a true horror classic. There’s no question that Stuart Walker proves to be a fairly pedestrian director. There’s also no question that it would have been a far better movie had Boris Karloff been cast as Dr Glennon (Universal had in fact planned to a werewolf movie starring Karloff as far back as 1932). Karloff would have brought to the role the right combination of obsessiveness, stubbornness, decency and kindliness, along with real menace as the werewolf. Henry Hull manages the obsessiveness and the stubbornness but he projects very little human warmth and as a result we feel less sympathy for him than we should.

It has also been suggested that Bela Lugosi would have been a better choice to play Dr Yogami. Lugosi in fact would have been perfect for this part but personally I like Warner Oland’s performance a great deal.

Werewolf of London has some major flaws and lacks the dramatic intensity and the sense of tragedy of The Wolf Man. Despite these flaws and despite having received a fairly bad press over the years it also has some very real strengths. The werewolf makeup by Jack Pierce is first-rate and is actually better and more effectively bestial than the makeup he created for The Wolf Man. The early scenes in Tibet are excellent and the first transformation scene is one of the best I’ve ever seen and very cleverly done as Dr Glennon passes behind a series of pillars, each time coming back into view with the transformation more advanced. The moon machine is also very cool.

The film’s greatest asset is that it incorporates so many good ideas and while it doesn’t quite do those ideas full justice it’s still a considerably better movie than its reputation would suggest. If you happen to be a real fan of werewolf movies then it’s absolutely essential viewing.

The DVD presentation in Universal’s Wolf Man Legacy set is very impressive.

The Wolf Man (1941)

2012-01-20T13:56:00.006+11:00

The Wolf Man was not the first werewolf movie, it was not even Universal’s first werewolf movie, but it was the movie that put werewolves on the map cinematically speaking. It created the template on which most future werewolf movies would be based.

While Universal liked to claim the movie took its inspiration from European folklore the truth is that screenwriter Curt Siodmak made most of it up. In doing so he created the werewolf legend that was to become so familiar.

Larry Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr) is the second son of an English baronet, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains). Being the second son he could not expect to inherit either the estate or the title and feeling that his father cared little for him he packed his bags and moved to the United States. As a result of the unexpected death of Sir John’s eldest son everything has changed. Larry has returned to the family seat, although perhaps more out of a vague sense of family duty than any great enthusiasm. Nonetheless when Sir John suggests they should forget the past he is prepared to do so and to try to accept his position as heir with good grace.

When he meets Gwen Conliffe (Evelyn Ankers) he starts to feel more enthusiastic about his prospects. He is immediately attracted to her and, although she is engaged to Sir John’s head gamekeeper it’s clear that she fees at least some interest in him as well.

All is going well until fate steps in. He visits a gypsy camp, accompanied by Gwen and Gwen’s friend Jenny Williams. Jenny wants to have her fortune read. The gypsy Bela (Bela Lugosi) becomes very agitated when he looks at her palm and tells her to flee. Moments later Larry sees Jenny attacked by a wolf and goes to rescue her. In doing so he is bitten by the wolf. He kills the wolf but the only body that is found is the body of the gypsy Bela.

Bela was of course a werewolf, and now that is to be Larry’s destiny as well. There is no escape.

The story behind the movie is as interesting as the movie itself. Curt Siodmak’s original script had the Larry Talbot character as an American named Larry Gill who was no relation to Sir John Talbot. He has simply come to Britain to install a telescope. More importantly, this first version suggested that Larry may have simply believed he was a werewolf but left the question as to whether he really transformed into a wolf ambiguous. There are still traces of this early version in the final film. Sir John Talbot believes his son is suffering from a delusion brought on by shock, and that the werewolf is a metaphor for the dark side of the human personality, a metaphor that has become real in Larry’s mind.

While that version could have made an interesting film, and in fact that very idea is the basis for the superb Val Lewton-produced Cat People made at RKO the following year. Universal however made the correct decision to ask Siodmak to rewrite the script to make the werewolf real. That is after all what Universal’s audience would have expected. The Lewton films took a very different approach to horror, but both approaches are valid in their own way.

This is one of Lon Chaney Jr’s finest performances. He makes Larry Talbot a very sympathetic character indeed and this is the key to the movie’s great success. He is the most tragic of all the Universal monsters, a man who has done nothing whatever to deserve his fate. Chaney manages to convey this without resorting to cheap sentimentality.

Claude Rains is excellent as always, the only problem being that I don’t think anybody could possibly believe that Lon Chaney Jr could be his son. Two men more physically dissimilar would be difficult to imagine. Bela Lugosi is shamefully under-utilised but makes the most of his brief screen time.

George Waggner might not have been the world’s most inspired director but he’s competent enough and he certainly understands how to pace a horror film.

Cinematographer Joseph Valentine and art director Jack Otterson combine to make this a visually very satisfying movie. Otterson’s forest set, built on a sound stage, is superb. It look outrageously artificial, giving the movie the feel of a dark fairy tale or a story out of legend. Jack Pierce’s wolf man makeup is the one element that in the past has caused me to have a problem with this movie. It’s not really very wolf-like, but I’ve finally learnt to accept it and to enjoy the movie’s other very considerable strengths.

A movie that works wonderfully well as a horror film but with more emotional punch than most of Universal’s monster flicks.

The DVD from the Wolf Man Legacy set looks very good and includes a documentary and commentary track.

At the Earth's Core (1976)

2012-01-18T15:38:00.007+11:00

In the mid-60s Hammer Films tried their hand at a series of vaguely science fictional adventure movies, with some success. In the mid-70s their great rivals, Amicus Productions, took the same path (fairly successfully also) with a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations, which included At the Earth's Core in 1976.

This was based on the first of Burroughs’ Pellucidar novels.

Eccentric scientist Dr Abner Perry (Peter Cushing) has designed a gigantic manned digging machine, the Iron Mole. This will open up a whole new field of exploration, deep within the Earth. The machine was paid for by one of Dr Perry’s former students, the rather flamboyant David Innes (Doug McClure). He was not one of Dr Perry’ more brilliant students but he did have the advantage of being extremely wealthy, wealthy enough to fund this ambitious project.

A test run has been organised which will see the machine burrow through a hill in Wales. Dr Perry and David Innes will make up the machine’s two-man crew. Things go very wring, the machine gets out of control, and they end up deep beneath the Earth’s surface. Very deep indeed. There they discover the lost world of Pellucidar.

It’s not a very happy world for its human inhabitants. It is ruled by the Mahars, giant bird-like winged creatures with telepathic powers. Their control over Pellucidar is enforced by another species, the human-like but vicious Sagoths.

The humans of Pellucidar are regularly captured and enslaved by the Mahars and our two intrepid explorers get caught in the net as well. David doesn’t take kindly to this and he determines to do what he can to overthrow the reign of the Mahars. He’s a courageous and honourable man but he has an ulterior motive as well - to free the beautiful princess Dia (Caroline Munro).

It’s all played very tongue-in-cheek, with Cushing overdoing it a little as the kindly dotty elderly professor. Given the movie’s target audience he can be forgiven for this. McClure is perfect for the role of David - bluff and blustering but brave and good-natured. As usual Caroline Munro isn’t given enough to do, but as always she gives a certain class to what she does do.

The budget wasn’t really equal to the film’s ambitions but since it’s played strictly as a fun rollicking adventure yarn it gets away with it and even when the special effects aren’t quite up to par they’re still fun. Actually the cheapness of the special effects and the sets adds to the cheese factor which adds to the movie’s charm.

Pure entertainment, and highly recommended.

MGM’s DVD release in their Midnite Movies range is barebones but looks stunning.

The Crawling Eye (1958)

2012-01-16T23:28:00.006+11:00

The Crawling Eye (The Trollenberg Terror) is another alien invasion movie, this one being a British effort dating from 1958.

American scientist Alan Brooks (Forrest Tucker) meets two attractive young English sisters on a train. He’s getting off at Trollenberg while they’re continuing on to Geneva. At least they were, until the younger sister suddenly announces that they absolutely must get off at Trollenberg. We later find out that they do a mind-reading act but one of the sisters really is psychic.

All is not well in the peaceful alpine village of Trollenberg. There have been an unusual number of climbing accidents recently, of a fairly gruesome nature. Climbers have been found beheaded. The villagers are falling prey to superstitious fears.

Brooks is there for professional reasons, to consult with Profesor Crevett (Warren Mitchell) at the observatory. They are studying cosmic rays but Crevett has other concerns at the moment - there’s a strange cloud that has settled on the upper slopes on the Trollenberg and it just stays there. That’s odd, but even odder is that the cloud is radioactive. He and Brooks have seen something like this before, several years earlier in the Andes. They had insufficient proof to justify informing the authorities but they had their suspicions that that cloud had been linked to a series of fatalities similar to the ones occurring now in Switzerland. Their suspicions went even further - that these strange events were the result of the activities of extraterrestrial visitors.

The death (again by beheading) of a geologist on the slopes of the Trollenberg seems to confirm their fears but they still don’t have evidence that would convince anyone. Not yet, but the evidence is not long in coming.

With a script by Jimmy Sangster this is actually a rather good little sci-fi flick. Director Quentin Lawrence wisely keeps us waiting for the payoff, concentrating on building up atmosphere.

There’s an extensive use of process shots but they’re done reasonably well and are not jarring.

Forrest Tucker makes a sympathetic hero and he’s reasonably believable. Warren Mitchell is fun as always. The acting is of a generally high standard, as you come to expect from British movies of this era, even low-budget productions such as this.

Image Entertainment have done a good job with the widescreen transfer. There’s a very small amount of print damage but on the whole picture quality is superb.

Horror Island (1941)

2012-01-13T21:59:00.005+11:00

Horror Island is fairly typical of Universal’s 1940s horror offerings, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Good-natured but shady and penniless would-be entrepreneur Bill Martin (Dick Foran) mets up with one-legged sea captain Tobias Clump (Leo Carillo) who claims to have found a map that shows the location of the treasure of the famous pirate Sir Henry Morgan. It’s on Morgan’s Island, which Bill Martin just happens to own. They take it to Professor Jasper Quinley’s shop but the professor gives them the bad news that the map is a fake.

Bill decides that a fake treasue map might still turn out to be a gold mine. He organises a treasure hunt. People will pay $50 to be taken to the island on his boat, and he’ll organise fake ghosts at the castle on the island to scare them. $50 was a lot of money in 1941 and I can’t imagine why anyone would shell out good money for such a trip but it’s just a movie so I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much about such details.

When they get to the island one of them is murdered and it becomes basically an Old Dark House movie, a genre that soldiered on for decades for no apparent reason.

Unfortunately it’s made clear right at the beginning that there are no real ghosts on the island so the movie misses out on being able to generate a moderate amount of interest by suggesting that the castle might be really haunted. There’s also the problem that the most convincing suspects get bumped off first.

There’s a mysterious caped figure named the Phantom running about but he fails to generate much excitement and it’s a subplot that really goes nowhere.

Since we know there’s nothing supernatural going on there no horror at all. We never really believe that the good guy characters are in the slightest danger so there’s no real suspense either. That leaves the comic element and it’s clear that this movie (like most of Universal’s 40s horror films) was intended mostly as comedy. The problem there is that there are very few laughs. In fact virtually none.

Dick Foran and Peggy Moran (who plays nice rich girl Wendy Creighton who must have been very bored indeed to join Bill Martin’s treasure hunt) are likable enough in an inoffensive way but they’re not capable of providing us with either thrills or laughs. There are several explicitly comic characters - the sea captain played by Leo Carillo, the professor, Bill Martin’s sidekick Stuff Oliver. Unfortunately they’re not very funny either.

You can’t blame director George Waggner too much. You can’t make bricks without straw and with an uninspired script and a lacklustre cast there wasn’t a great deal he could have done.

So what we’re left with is an innocuous but rather feeble movie and we’re grateful it only runs for 60 minutes.

Universal have provided an excellent DVD transfer in their Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive boxed set. In fact all five movies in the set look terrific but sadly they’re mostly very uninteresting movies and it’s a boxed set that is probably best avoided unless you’re a Universal horror completist.

The X-Files (1998)

2012-01-10T16:05:00.006+11:00

Despite having been a long-time fan of the TV series The X-Files I’ve only just caught up with the 1998 movie.

While the government conspiracy theory involving extraterrestrials was, as the series creator Chris Carter asserts, the backbone of the series it was also in many ways its least satisfactory element. That conspiracy theory takes centre stage in the movie but it works better than one might have expected.

The attempt to make the movie as cinematic as possible, to do things on a more epic scale than in the TV series, is reasonably successful. The movie makes extensive use of CGI and while I generally detest CGI I must admit it’s used quite well. The big weakness of CGI in my opinion is that people (and human-like monsters) always look very fake but in this movie the producers have wisely used CGI mostly to render objects and settings.

The series had such a distinctive look (not so obvious now since it’s been widely copied but back in 1993 it was quite startling) that the producers faced the challenge of keeping as much of that visual style as possible while at the same time opening it up for the big screen and making it not look like just an extended episode. Not a particularly easy thing to pull off but it’s done quite well.

The strength of the series was always the Mulder-Scully relationship and that, quite sensibly, remains a major focus in the movie.

The story begins with a terrorist bomb threat but of course it turns that things are not as they appear. Actually the movie itself begins with a prologue 37 million years ago, a prologue that will later tie in with the main story. The action eventually movies to the Antarctic with some fairly effective visual moments there.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the film is that there’s a considerable focus on the mysterious elderly men who seem to be behind the whole conspiracy. These men are familiar to viewers of the series but the movie shows us that their motivations may be more complex than we’d thought. Fans of the Cigarette Smoking Man (and I include myself in that number) will not be disappointed. Even if you’re not a fan of conspiracy theories it has to be admitted that The X-Files does give us conspiracy theories that are less simplistic than most.

And of course there’s something here for those viewers who love obsessing over that Mulder-Scully relationship. As with the series the movie still keeps things suitably ambiguous in this respect.

While the story more or less stands alone it does help a good deal if you’re familiar with the TV show.

On the whole it’s good entertainment value.

The New Invisible Man (1958)

2012-01-06T11:58:00.009+11:00

Any Mexican science fiction or horror movie from 50s and 60s is guaranteed to be fun and The New Invisible Man (El hombre que logró ser invisible), from 1958, is no exception.

I’m told this is more or less a remake of one of the sequels to Universal’s 1930s Invisible Man movies, although as I’ve only seen the first of the Universal films I can’t confirm that.

A Mexican scientist is working on the problem of invisibility when his brother is accused of a murder he didn’t commit. So he saves him from capture by making him invisible.

Being invisible is handy when it comes to tracking down murderers but unfortunately there’s an unforeseen side effect - the invisibility process eventually produces insanity. So while the invisible bother is hunting down the real killer the scientist brother has to try to come up not only with a way of reversing the invisibility process but also of curing the insanity that goes with it.

The invisible brother’s girlfriend stands by him but as the madness progresses the entire city is endangered as the invisible man convinces himself he’s some kind of avenging angel with a mission to rid the world of evil, and he sees evil everywhere.

Director Alfredo B. Crevenna and writer Alfredo Salazar were involved in the making of countless Mexican genre movies and they’re more than competent.

The acting is solid enough. The special effects are cheap but reasonably effective.

This is not, it has to be admitted, one of the better Mexican sci-fi/horror movies of its era but it still provides decent entertainment and it's worth a look.

It’s featured in the boxed set Crypt of Terror: Horror South of the Border, Volume 2. They’re rather indifferent prints and only the English dubbed versions are included but the set does include some very good movies most of which are unlikely ever to be released in better editions so it's still worth grabbing.

Not of This Earth (1957)

2012-01-02T19:18:00.005+11:00

Roger Corman really hit his stride as a film-maker with the first of his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, The Fall of the House of Usher, in 1960. His movies prior to that are a mixed bag. His early science fiction efforts were notable for the ingenious ways in which he contrived to make science fiction movies with virtually no money, but some of them do suffer from being just a little bit too low-budget. Not of This Earth being a good example.

Paul Johnson (played by Paul Birch) is a rather odd fellow who turns up at a clinic asking for a a blood transfusion, but refusing to take the obligatory blood test first. Luckily he has mond-control powers so he’s able to persuade the doctor to do the blood test but not to reveal the results to anyone. In fact Paul Johnson has a refrigerator full of blood. He’s an alien and he’s studying the inhabitants of Earth, starting with their blood.

Johnson’s blood is like nothing the doctor’s ever seen before. He can’t figure out how this guy is still alive. Johnson’s strange blood disease explains his mission to Earth. All his people are afflicted and they’re looking for a cure. But they’re looking for more than that, as will later become apparent.

Johnson is assigned a full-time nurse, Nadine Storey (played by Beverly Garland). He has another employee, a rather disreputable character, a petty criminal. As it happens Nadine is dating a policeman, a circumstance which will cause Johnson some inconvenience. Both he and Nadine suspect that strange things are going on at the Johnson house. Johnson invites three bums to dinner, but the bums are never seen again. Johnson is collecting more than blood samples.

Not of This Earth follows a rather typical pattern for 1950s alien invasion movies - the aliens are as much victim as villains. Their planet, Davana, has been devastated by nuclear war (another all too familiar trope in 50s sci-fi). Johnson’s mission is their last chance for survival, but will the survival of the people of Davana come at the expense of the people of Earth?

Making a science fiction movie when you don’t have the budget to cover such desirable things as special effects, spaceships and fancy alien makeup is quite a challenge, and Corman does a pretty fair job of it. How do you make aliens seem alien without expensive makeup effects? You give them strange eyes, mind-control powers and telepathy, all of which have the advantage of costing nothing.

You also give the aliens a teleportation device, much cheaper than having to provide spaceship models!

None of that would suffice without the right acting performances, and that’s where Paul Birch comes in. He’s disconnected enough to seem truly alien and he’s sinister whilst also being rather tragic. Anna Lee Carroll is equally effective as a Davana woman trying to flee her doomed home planet.

Beverly Garland gives a solid performance as well although the human characters are oddly enough on the whole much less interesting and less sympathetic than the aliens.

The rash of sympathetic alien movies is one of the mysteries of the 1950s, presumably a reaction to the nuclear war hysteria of the time. Not of This Earth is a reasonably good example of the breed, and a good example of Corman’s ability to make surprisingly intelligent movies for a drive-in audience. It looks very cheap, which it was, but it’s worth a look.

The Region 2 DVD from In2Film is at best a barely acceptable transfer. At least it’s incredibly cheap!

From Beyond the Grave (1974)

2012-01-01T11:56:00.006+11:00

I’ve never been a huge fan of Amicus’s horror anthology films but either From Beyond the Grave is a particularly good one or I’m mellowing a bit because I thoroughly enjoyed it.

As usual there’s a framing story connecting the various segments and in this case that framing story works rather nicely and actually does tie the stories together to a certain extent. All four episodes are based on tales by R. Chetwynd-Hayes.

It benefits from a extremely strong cast.

Peter Cushing plays the owner of an antiques shop called Temptations, and it’s well named. The temptation is provided by the items in the shop and there is a further temptation at work - the temptation to try to cheat the owner. Buying anything from this store is dangerous enough but if you’re dishonest it’s even more perilous.

The first segment stars David Warner. He sees an antique mirror in the shop and convinces the proprietor that it’s not as old as it’s claimed to be, thereby getting the mirror for a fraction of what it’s really worth. It proves to be a poor bargain. This is a vampire mirror, or at least it’s a mirror that contains a kind of vampire. The figure in the mirror craves blood and poor David Warner is forced to commit a series of murders to feed this bloodlust. It’s a very gory segment but it’s genuinely horrific even if the idea is a bit thin.

The second segment is much stronger. It’s an object lesson in telling a quite complex tale very succintly. Ian Bannen plays a middle-aged ex-army paymaster married unhappily to Diana Dors. She dominates him and constantly mocks him for being weak and ineffectual, which he is. He encounters an old soldier, played by Donald Pleasence, and he succumbs to the temptation to present himself as a real war hero. To do this he steals a medal from Peter Cushing’s shop, a medal he is not entitled to wear. He faces other temptations as well when he meets the old soldier’s daughter (played by Donald Pleasence’s real-life daughter Angela), the temptations of lust and of revenge.

It’s easy to see why his wife despises him but at the same time we can’t help but feel rather sorry for a man who is lonely and all too well ware of his on inadequacies. And while it’s easy to see why he hates his wife we feel some sympathy for her as well, married to a man who is in many ways a bit of a loser, and a pompous loser as well.

He will soon find that he’s been well and truly ensnared and that getting what you want is not always a good thing. This is by far the most interesting and most impressive of the four segments.

The third segment introduces some comic relief, with Ian Carmichael as a well-to-do businessman who cheats the proprietor into selling him a snuff box worth £40 for just £5 and then compounds his sin by beating the poor man down to just £4. He thinks he’s made a rather good deal until a rather eccentric woman on a train points out that he has a very nasty elemental perched in his shoulder. Luckily she’s a psychic and she gives him her card and tells him to call her if he needs help dealing with the homicidal elemental. He thinks it’s all a great joke, until the elemental tries to kill his wife. It’s silly light-hearted fun but it comes off fairly well.

The final segment sees Ian Ogilvy buying a very gothic-looking door. He gives Peter Cushing the £40 agreed to but when Cushing leaves the till unattended he has the opportunity to steal back part of the purchase price. By this time we know that cheating this shop owner is a very unwise thing to do. He discovers that the door leads to a ghost room, a room that exists in another realm, a room that was created by an evil occultist centuries earlier. And the room needs to be fed, with souls. It’s the most visually spectacular of the four segments and provides a fitting finale.

The acting throughout is uniformly excellent. It’s almost unfair to single out any individual performance but if I had to do so I’d pick Angela Pleasence’s unbelievably creepy turn in the second segment.

Director Kevin Connor did some good work for Amicus in the early 70s and this is no exception.

The pacing is excellent, there’s real creepiness and real horror, and while some of the component stories are stronger than others they’re all entertaining. This is classic 70s British horror and is highly recommended.

The First Men in the Moon (1964)

2011-12-28T16:07:00.005+11:00

The 1950s saw a rash of big-budget Victorian science fiction films, based on the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells (presumably the only early science fiction writers most movie producers had heard of), a genre kicked off by Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Most of these movies are excellent; all are at least watchable. The First Men in the Moon appeared in 1964 making it one of the last such movies. It’s one of the weakest as well, but it’s still well worth catching.

A framing story has been added, not that it’s really needed. In the 1960s when the first manned mission lands on the surface of the Moon they make an extraordinary discovery - a Union Jack. Even stranger, they find a proclamation, claiming the Moon in the name of Queen Victoria, and dated 1899! An investigation is launched and it is established that one of the people who reached the Moon in 1899 is still alive. He tells his amazing story.

Joseph Cavour (Lionel Jeffries) is an eccentric scientist who has made a potentially earth-shattering discovery. He has discovered a substance that has the same effect on gravity that lead sheeting has on x-rays - it blocks the force of gravity. He has named the substance cavourite, after himself.

Th only thing is, the production of cavourite is slightly hazardous (it tends to involve fairly regular explosions), and Cavour is concerned about his neighbours, the inhabitants of Cherry Cottage. So he makes an offer to buy the cottage. Thats’ how he makes the acquaintance of Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd) and Kate Callender (Martha Hyer). Arnold doesn’t actually own the cottage but he doesn’t allow a small detail like that to prevent him from selling it. But rather than keep the money he decides to invest it in Cavour’s experiments.

Arnold has various ideas as to what cavorite could be used for but Cavor knows what he wants to use it for - a trip to the Moon! Arnold is persuaded to join this expedition. The untimely arrival of the bailiffs means that a third passenger will be making the trip - Arnold can’t leave Kate behind to sort out his financial mess so she must accompany them.

The journey to the Moon is uneventful but some surprises await our adventurers upon arrival. They discover an underground world that has breathable air, and they also discover the insectoid inhabitants of the Moon, the Selenites.

As you’d expect in a movie with special effects by Ray Harryhausen, there are monsters. Well, only one real monster, which is perhaps a little disappointing.

The major problem with this movie is that it’s played just a little too much for laughs, especially in the first half. A little bit of Lionel Jeffries goes a long way. The other cast members are adequate enough.

Nathan Juran directed many science fiction movies in the 50s, most of which are great fun.

The sets have the steampunk feel that makes these Victorian science fiction films so appealing.

The Region 2 DVD includes a couple of featurettes although they’re the same ones included in the other movies released as part of the Ray Harryhausen Signature Collection. The widescreen presentation is impressive though.

All in all The First Men in the Moon offers plenty of entertainment value, even if Lionel Jeffries’ performance is a bit excessive.

The Black Torment (1964)

2011-12-26T15:56:00.005+11:00

The Black Torment is an almost forgotten 1964 British gothic horror flick, which is a great pity because it’s a good deal of fun.

It was produced by Tony Tenser who later went on to found Tigon British Film Productions, a company responsible for some of the most interesting British horror movies of the 60s and early 70s.

The film is set in 18th century England. Sir Richard Fordyke (John Turner) returns to his ancestral home with his new bride, the Lady Elizabeth (Heather Sears). Strange rumours have been circulating that he has been seen in the local area even though he has been away in London for some months. Strange and rather sinister rumours involving assaults on young women. And there are reports that he has been been seen being pursued on horseback by his deceased first wife, the Lady Anne.

The atmosphere at his home is somewhat strained. His father has had a stroke and cannot speak. He communicates in sign language, but the only person who can understand him is the sister of Sir Richard’s first wife. Anne Fordyke committed suicide by throwing herself out of a window and there are those who blame Sir Richard for her death. Sir Richard has the reputation of possessing a passionate and rather volatile temperament, something that is not improved by the rumours surrounding him.

The strange sightings of Sir Richard continue after his return, leading to much confusion and suspicion. Can the fiery nobleman be in two places at the same time? Is the Fordyke manor haunted, and if so, who or what is doing the haunting?

The movie has an appealingly manic quality to it, a quality that is increased by the tendency of virtually all the actors to overact outrageously. There’s an atmosphere of suppressed hysteria. Compared to other British gothic horror movies of its era, especially Hammer’s, it has a much more overheated feel.

The acting is terrific, as long as you like completely over-the-top performances (which I have no problem with). John Turner is the worst offender, or the most enjoyably excessive, depending on your point of view.

Director Robert Hartford-Davis had a fairly brief and uneven career which included Incense for the Damned (AKA Bloodsuckers), a movie that has few defenders but which I thought was quite interesting even if not totally successful.

Production values are quite high showing that Hammer weren’t the only ones able to make handsome period pictures on very low budgets. There’s also a fairly impressive sword fight. And there are some genuine chills.

On the whole it’s entertaining hokum and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Odeon have released this one as an all-regions PAL DVD in their Best of British series. It’s unfortunately fullframe and without extras but the picture quality is fine and it’s inexpensive.

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

2011-12-24T16:04:00.006+11:00

Diamonds Are Forever was the seventh Bond film, and the last official Bond film to star Sean Connery. It marked a definite move towards the camp sensibility that would come to dominate the series in the Roger Moore era.

Connery had very little interest in doing Bond movies by this time, but with George Lazenby unwilling to go on with the series after On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the producers offered Connery a great deal of money and he reluctantly agreed to return to the role. They had apparently been considering John Gavin, which would have been a spectacularly bad casting decision.

Diamonds Are Forever is based very very loosely on the fourth of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. The movie opens with Bond killing Blofeld, but of course nobody is going to believe that such a splendid villain is really going to be killed off. With the threat from SPECTRE apparently neutralised Bond finds himself assigned to what seems to be a fairly routine case, involving diamond smuggling on a large scale.

Bond assumes he’s going to be sent to South Africa but in fact he ends up in Las Vegas where he has to make contact with the appropriately named Tiffany Case (Jill St John). He uncovers a mystery involving the disappearance of billionaire casino owner Willard Whyte and it soon becomes obvious that more than diamond smuggling is at stake.

Charles Gray makes an adequate Blofeld but he lacks the genuine menace that Telly Savalas brought to the role in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Jill St John and Lana Wood (as the wonderfully named Plenty O’Toole) provide the requisite glamour. Putter Smith and Bruce Glover are fun as the sinister gay assassins Mr Kidd and Mr Wint.

Connery may not have been enthusiastic about taking the role but there are no problems with his performance.

The action sequences are an odd mix of engaging silliness (the moon buggy chase) and high-powered excitement (with Bond and Tiffany being chased through the streets of Las Vegas in a bright-red Ford Mustang). The special effects in the climactic scenes have been much criticised but the main problem is that an oil rig is not really an exciting enough locale for the climax to a Bond movie.

The movie’s strengths generally outweigh its weaknesses, with production designer Ken Adam providing some memorable sets (especially the fish tank bed), and director Guy Hamilton and cinematographer Ted Moore both know exactly what they’re doing when making a Bond film.

The real star of the film is Las Vegas which provides a perfect setting with its mix of glamour, sleaze, excess and surreal extravagance. The circus in a casino is a definite highlight. The desperate fight in a tiny elevator cage is equally memorable, one of two very impressive fight scenes (the other being Bond’s fight with the two female gymnasts)

I have a soft spot for Diamonds Are Forever since it was the first Bond movie I ever saw. It still holds up rather well. Highly entertaining if occasionally silly fun.

Batman and Robin (1949)

2011-12-22T18:50:00.004+11:00

Batman and Robin, made by Columbia in 1949, was the second movie serial to feature the caped crime-fighter. Lewis Wilson had played Batman in the original 1943 serial but for the 1949 version he was replaced by Robert Lowery.

This time the arch-villain is The Wizard, and he’s managed to get hold of a remote control device. This is not just any remote control device, this is the ultimate remote control device. It can take control of absolutely any piece of machinery. The Wizard is aiming eventually at power but he starts out using the device to blackmail the railroads into giving him vast sums of money.

Tracking down The Wizard is going to be a challenge since he can take control of any motor vehicle anywhere and bring it to a standstill. Commissioner Gordon is definitely going to need Batman’s help.

The remote control machine is powered by diamonds and it uses a lot of them, which is the reason that Gotham City has experienced so many diamond robberies recently.

The situation becomes even more serious when The Wizard steals the neutraliser from the man who invented the remote control machine, Professor Hamill. This gadget can do ore than just neutralise the effects of the remote control device. Combining the two devices has the effect of making things, or people, invisible!

This is a fairly typical movie serial of its era, very low-budget but hugely enjoyable. It looks very very cheap but that just adds to the fun. The plot has plenty of twists and turns. And there are silly gadgets (The Wizard has a submarine which really serves no purpose at all but submarines are cool so they threw one in).

Robert Lowery as Batman and Johnny Duncan as Robin take things very seriously and Lyle Talbot is a wonderful Commissioner Gordon. Lyle Talbot was one of the great B-movie actors. Jane Adams adds a touch of glamour as feisty newspaper photographer Vicki Vale. There are lots of B-movie heavies and plenty of hardboiled dialogue.

While the emphasis in serials was always on thrills and fun it doesn’t have the camp sensibility of the 1960s TV series. It has its own flavour and its own charm.

Columbia’s DVD release is superb. Picture and sound quality are terrific.

This Island Earth (1955)

2011-12-19T20:01:00.010+11:00

Universal’s This Island Earth was one of the more ambitious science fiction movies of the 50s. It’s been overshadowed by films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet but in its own way it’s just as interesting.

It’s also typical of American science fiction movies of that era in its ambiguous treatment of the theme of alien invasion. It’s one of several such movies that suggested that taken invaders might not necessarily be completely hostile, or at the very least that they might have some justification for their actions.

The first half of the movie is especially clever. An electronics engineer, Dr Cal Meacham, at a major laboratory orders a part. The part that arrives is far more advanced than anything he’s ever seen, and the company from which he ordered it denies any knowledge of it. He orders more parts and receives a catalogue ad instructions for constructing an apparatus. He has no idea what this apparatus will do but being an inquisitive kind of chappie he builds it anyway.

It turns out to be a communications device (which he is told is called an interociter) and a guy with a curiously pronounced forehead contacts him and tells him to be at a remote airstrip at a particular time where a plane will take him somewhere where he’ll discover all sorts of interesting things. Now the average person would be pretty suspicious of all this but like he said he’s an inquisitive fellow and so he goes. He’s taken to a laboratory where a group of mysterious people have assembled a team of top-flight atomic scientists.

One of the scientists is, naturally, a beautiful woman. Dr Ruth Adams (Faith Domergue) in fact is an old fame of Cal Meacham’s but strangely she claims never to have set eyes on him before. These scientists do seem to be behaving a bit oddly and several of them have started to suspect that something very strange is behind all this. And they’re right about that. The guys with the big foreheads are of course aliens, from the planet Metaluna.

At the halfway point the movie not only switches settings but also switches tone as the aliens are recalled to their own planet. Cal and Ruth are trying to make their escape in a light plane but it’s snared by a tractor beam from the aliens’ flying saucer and they find themselves on the way to Metaluna. And they discover that the aliens aren’t evil, they’re merely desperate. They are engaged in a war with the planet Zagon and they’re losing. The laboratory on earth was part of a last-ditch attempt to find a way to save their civilisation.

This Island Earth was filmed in Technicolor and Universal did their best to give it an epic feel. Mostly they succeeded although the special effects occasionally let them down. The alien planet is rendered mostly with matte paintings and although they look obviously artificial the imaginative nature of the paintings does give an eerie other-worldly feel. Personally I like the use of matte paintings even when they’re obvious. And there are some pretty impressive sets.

There are also some very cool concepts, such as the use of comets and meteors as weapon of mass destruction. That’s the great strength of this movie - the aliens use technologies that seem genuinely alien, rather than death rays and similar gadgets.

The acting is quite passable with most of the players appearing to do their best to take proceedings as seriously as possible.

With an intelligent thoughtful script and plenty of visual imagination this movie represents 1950s Hollywood sci-fi at its best.

Universal’s UK DVD release is coded for Regions 2, 4 and 5 and although there’s a lack of extras it’s a very impressive widescreen transfer and I recommend it unhesitatingly.

The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

2011-12-17T13:31:00.007+11:00

Terence Fisher will always be best remembered for his Hammer horror films but he made quite a few science fiction movies, including this 1964 effort, The Earth Dies Screaming.

It’s an end of the world movie, an incredibly popular genre at the time. A mysterious gas attack has wiped out most of Earth’s population, but as in any good post-apocalyptic movie there’s a motley handful of survivors. The gas attack has been followed up by an invasion of robot men. We assume they’re from outer space although we never get to see any spaceships.

In fact what the audience sees is exactly what the survivors see. The movie doesn’t tell us or show us anything that is outside of their immediate experience.

The survivors aren’t entirely the sorts of people you’d pick to save civilisation. Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker) is a no-nonsense engineer type and he’s the only one who really has any clue about what to do. Edgar (Thorley Walters) is a nice guy but a total mess, Quinn Taggart (Dennis Price) is completely untrustworthy, there’s a nice young couple who are OK as long as someone tells them what to do but on the whole one feels that these people have the odds stacked against them.

But they’re British and if Hitler couldn’t beat them they’re certainly not going to let a bunch of robots do it.

This movie is in some ways a precursor of the wave of zombie movies that would infest cinema screens in the 70s and 80s. It’s almost a dry run for Night of the Living Dead. The people killed by the robots come back to life as zombies.

This is a very low-budget movie but it’s not unduly hampered by this. The robots look reasonably good, the zombies are distinguished only by their eyes, and Terence Fisher manages to make both seem convincingly menacing.

The acting is adequate enough with Dennis Price being highly entertaining as always.
zombies.

An entertaining enough blend of science and horror.

The Region 2 DVD from Final Cut is a perfectly acceptable widescreen transfer.

The Fly (1958)

2011-12-12T07:11:00.005+11:00

The Fly (I’m speaking of course of the original 1958 version) is a rather odd Vincent Price science fiction/horror movie. Price plays a minor supporting role and is neither the villain nor the doomed hero.

The actual hero is Andre Delambre (played by David Hedison although at that time he was calling himself Al Hedison). Andre is a scientist. Not a mad scientist, but a scientist who is dabbling in Things that Science Should Not Dabble In. His current project is teleportation. He has succeeded in teleporting objects over short distances, but with mixed results. Sometimes the objects are reversed during the process. When he tries to teleport his pet cat the results are entirely unsuccessful.

You’d think this would have acted as a warning that maybe this process is rather dangerous but despite this Andre decides to use himself as an experimental test subject. The first attempt is successful, but when he tries to repeat the experiment he unfortunately fails to notice that a fly is in the chamber with him. This is a very unlucky oversight since now his atoms and the fly’s atoms are mixed up. He is part man and part fly, and so is the fly.

Everything would be OK if he could find the fly. He could simply repeat the process and hopefully everything would then come unscrambled. But you’d be amazed just how difficult it can be to find one particular fly again.

The story is told in flashback, with the movie starting with what is actually the horrifying (and very gruesome) end of Andre’s story.

The story is really too ambitious for the special effects that were available at the time, but the story is strong enough to largely overcome that problem.

In most of these scientific hubris movies the scientist is clearly working in areas that raise moral questions about the limits of science, but this one is interesting because Andre is not really doing that. He’s not playing around with the building blocks of life or trying to play God by conquering death or creating artificial life. He’s not doing anything that anyone could raise any valid moral objections to it. So his downfall is brought about purely by bad luck. The most you could say is that he is perhaps being too ambitious.

The story raises potentially interesting questions about what makes us human but it largely ignores such issues. That’s one of the things that that makes David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake a more interesting film.

David Hedison makes a reasonably effective scientist doomed hero. Vincent Price is good as always but the movie doesn’t really give him much opportunity for demonstrating his acting skills. Patricia Owens as Andre’s wife has the most interesting role, a woman facing a murder charge who has to try to convince the sympathetic detective (played by Herbert Marshall) that her strange tale is true and that therefore it wasn’t really murder.

The most emotionally charged scene, the one with the spider’s web, remains affecting despite the rather crude special effects.

While the science is very silly that’s not really the main point of the movie which is more concerned with the tragic fate of Andre and the appalling dilemma faced by his wife, and it’s that aspect that distinguishes it from most other science fiction movies of its era and makes it worth seeing.

Fox’s DVD release is barebones but it’s a decent enough print and preserves the film’s correct Cinemascope aspect ratio.

Shout at the Devil (1976)

2011-12-09T12:00:00.008+11:00

Shout at the Devil is an old-fashioned action adventure movie. Even by the standards of 1976 it’s an old-fashioned representative of its genre. And that’s why it’s so wonderfully entertaining.

This is not a movie that wants to deconstruct the action movie. There is absolutely no irony to this film. It’s completely unashamed to be exactly what it is, a rollicking tale of adventure.

Flynn O’Flynn (Lee Marvin) is an American big game hunter in East Africa in 1913. He lives in Portuguese East Africa but he regularly crosses the border into German East Africa in search of ivory. He’s not exactly scrupulous about minor details like laws and borders, and his activities are often quite close to outright thieving. He’s also drunk most of the time, but he’s a happy drunk. He’s your typical loveable rogue, the kind of person the modern world has less and less time for, but in 1913 the world was a different place and such a man as Flynn O’Flynn could thrive in that world.

His latest venture is even less legal than usual and to carry it off he needs to ship his ill-gotten ivory downriver and to do this he needs an Englishman so he can maintain the fiction that his vessel is operating under the British flag. That’s where Sebastian Oldsmith (Roger Moore) comes in. Oldsmith is conned into participating but in fact he’s a bit of a rogue himself. Before falling in with O’Flynn he was on his way to Australia, his family having raised the passage money. They wanted him as far away as possible. Oldsmith and O’Flynn make perfect partners.

For Oldsmith there’s another attraction, O’Flynn’s beautiful daughter Rosa. He and Rosa are soon married and Sebastian is happily settling into a life of big game hunting and assorted illegal ventures. But O’Flynn and Oldsmith have a nemesis - Commandant Fleischer, the German military governor in the neighbouring portion of German East Africa. O’Flynn and Fleischer have clashed many times in the past and they hate each other with a venom that increases day by day.

On one of their jaunts into German territory O’Flynn and Oldsmith have their first encounter with the German battlecruiser Blücher when it rams and sinks their dhow.

The declaration of war in 1914 gives Fleischer the excuse he has always wanted to cross the frontier and settle accounts with the troublesome O’Flynn. The tragic results of this expedition will seal Fleischer’s fate as O’Flynn and Oldsmith vow to hunt him down and kill him. As it happens their quest for revenge dovetails quite nicely with the Royal Navy’s plans. They believe the Blücher is taking refuge in an East African river and they want it sunk but they have no warships in the vicinity powerful enough to take on a battlecruiser, so O’Flynn and Oldsmith are recruited to do the job by sabotage, a task they can combine with revenge since Fleischer is believed to be on board.

The first two-thirds of this movie is pure silly fun with a nice mix of action and humour. It then takes a rather darker turn as it moves towards its apocalyptic climax but the excitement doesn’t let up.

The miniatures work is very impressive, as you’d expect when the man responsible for it is Derek Meddings, who started out on Gerry Anderson’s 1960s puppet adventure series and moved on from there to the Roger Moore James Bond movies.

Lee Marvin and Roger Moore make a great team. They might be rogues but they’re still the good guys and we want them to win. Rene Kolldehoff is delightfully over-the-top as Fleischer. Fleischer is not exactly a subtle villain, but this is not a movie that is overly worried about subtlety.

This is one of the most politically incorrect movies you’re ever going to see, a movie that could not possibly get made today. So that’s another point in its favour.

Umbrella Entertainment’s Region 4 DVD release is an uncut widescreen release and while the picture quality isn’t sensational it’s quite reasonable. It appears that some of the other DVD releases of this movie have been savagely cut and are very poor quality so the Umbrella disc is probably the one to go for. I suspect that online reviewers who complain about this movie’s supposed incoherence have only seen the cut version because the full version certainly cannot be accused of such a fault. It might be far-fetched but it all makes perfect sense.

This is a movie to enjoy for what it is. On its own terms it succeeds admirably and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

S.O.B. (1981)

2011-12-06T17:04:00.007+11:00

Blake Edwards made some amazingly popular and well-loved movies but personally I don’t find those movies all that interesting. You couldn’t pay me to sit through one of the Pink Panther movies again. For me his most interesting works were those that were most reviled by the critics, notably Darling Lili. And of course S.O.B.

S.O.B., Edwards’ hate letter to Hollywood, was undoubtedly partly inspired by his unhappy experiences with Darling Lili. Of all the many “I hate Hollywood” movies that have been made over the years by Hollywood film-makers S.O.B. may well be the most bitter of the lot.

Given the fact that one of the stars of S.O.B. is William Holden, also the star of BiIly Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, this is clearly a movie drawing on a tradition of anti-Hollywood movies.

Felix Farmer is a very successful Hollywood producer. Very successful until the release of his most expensive and most ambitious film, Night Wind. This movie’s opening is the most disastrous in the history of Tinsel Town.

The response of the studio execs is to panic, try to shift the blame elsewhere, call in lawyers and hope that something might be salvaged by recutting the film. It’s all Standard Operational Bullshit, hence the movie’s title. Felix Farmer’s response is to go mad and try to kill himself.

The response of his wife, much-loved incredibly wholesome G-rated movie star Sally Miles (Julie Andrews), is to file for divorce. Until she realises that might do her career even more harm.

Felix finally snaps out of his suicidal depression when he has a revelation. He now knows how to save his movie. The problem with Night Wind was that it was wholesome and sweet and G-rated. If Felix can turn it into a soft-porn movie it will be a huge success. And he has an even more brilliant idea. Imagine if he could persuade his dear wife Sally Miles to do a nude scene. That would have to be worth a couple of hundred million at the box office.

Of course Sally Miles has exactly the sort of screen image that Julie Andrews had in real life so she’s absolutely horrified by the idea. On the other hand she’s even more horrified by the prospect of losing a great deal of her own money if Night Wind cannot be turned into a hit. So she agrees.

S.O.B.’s humour is dark, vicious, bitter and vindictive, but it is undeniably funny. Blake Edwards, who wrote the screenplay as well as directing, was never particularly subtle when it came to comedy and this time around he adopts a sledge-hammer approach to satire. But given that his target is Hollywood perhaps nothing short of a sledge hammer would do the trick.

There’s a galaxy of stars in the supporting cast. Overloading a movie with stars can be a recipe for disaster but mostly they do a fine job. The standout performer is Robert Preston as dissolute Hollywood doctor Dr Irving Finegarten. Robert Vaughn as the sleazy studio chief and Loretta Swit as the toxic gossip columnist are both amusing. Shelley Winters and Larry Hagman add to the fun. William Holden makes a splendid cynical drunk.

Richard Mulligan is convincingly unhinged as Felix while Julie Andrews has fun trashing her own image.

While it’s mostly notorious as being the movie in which we get to see Mary Poppins bare-breasted this is a thoroughly enjoyable if somewhat out-of-control ride and I recommend it.

The Region 1 DVD is bereft of extras and is somewhat difficult to find. There’s a European DVD release floating around as well but it appears to be a heavily cut version so the Region 1 disc is the one to go for.

Magic (1978)

2011-12-03T14:38:00.007+11:00

Magic is an evil-ventriloquists’-dummy movie. The problem with evil-ventriloquists’-dummy movies is that they’re fairly predictable, and Magic is more predictable than most.

The only real question with such movies is whether the dummy represents some supernatural force or whether it represents a part of the ventriloquist’s own personality. Whichever option the film-maker chooses the plot will hold few surprises.

In this case we have Corky Withers (Anthony Hopkins) who has spent years being a magician’s assistant before finally summoning up the courage to try to make it on on his own. His first attempt is a disaster and he not only bombs he also loses his cool and insults the audience. This is our first clue that Corky may be a little unstable and it comes much too early.

Within a year Corky has become a modest success, a success that is entirely due to his new partner Fats. Fats is a ventriloquist’s dummy, but his foul-mouthed hyper-confident persona provides the perfect foil to Corky’s insecure, painfully shy and socially inept persona.

Corky’s success has gained him an agent, Ben Greene (Burgess Meredith). Greene is confident he can take Corky from his present level of success to the next level - success in the world of network television. The prospect of success terrifies Corky and he flees back to his home town. When he gets there he encounters his high school sweetheart Peg (Ann-Margret). He’s never forgotten he and she’s never forgotten him.

Corky and Peg rekindle their high school romance but unfortunately Peg now has a husband. It’s not just an awkward romantic triangle, it’s a romantic quadrangle, since Fats is every bit as jealous as Peg’s husband. Ben Greene manages to track Corky down in his rural hideaway and is horrified to discover that Corky is totally out of control. He wants Corky to seek psychiatric help and in one of the movie’s more memorable scenes he challenges Corky to keep Fats quiet for five minutes. Corky is of course unable to do so.

The Corky/Fats relationship spirals further and further out of control while the return of Peg’s husband puts even more pressure on Corky.

Not unexpectedly all this eventually leads to violence, murder and madness.

The first choice for the role of Corky was Jack Nicholson, but Anthony Hopkins shows he can overact every bit as outrageously as Nicholson. It’s a bravura performance but the weak point to it is that Corky is really not a very sympathetic character. Luckily Ann-Margret is on hand to lend the movie some much-needed balance. She provides the emotional core of the movie because she’s the only character who is even halfway to being a decent human being. She’s an underrated actress and she gives a splendid performance.

Burgess Meredith is never less than entertaining and he has a lot of fun as the brash agent with a love for enormous cigars. The relationship between Corky and Greene is one of the more successful elements in this movie.

As for Fats, the idea of having a foul-mouthed ventriloquist’s dummy must have seemed terribly clever back in the 70s but it’s an an idea that gets old very quickly.

Richard Attenborough is one of Britain’s greatest actors but as a director he’s less than inspired although certainly competent.

Magic fails to produce the necessary cinematic magic to make its story truly compelling and the horror is all too predictable. As an exercise in psychological horror it lacks impact since Corky is clearly not playing with a full deck even before the arrival of Fats.

Umbrella Entertainment’s Region 4 DVD is full frame and generally unimpressive and cannot be recommended under any circumstances.

Mr Sardonicus (1961)

2011-12-01T16:31:00.007+11:00

William Castle may have been the master of the gimmick and may well have been greater as a showman than as a director but his 1961 offering Mr Sardonicus demonstrates that he could produce the goods when needed.

He’s helped considerably by the writing. Ray Russell wrote the screenplay based on his own novella and it manages to avoid the worst clichés of the gothic horror genre while at the same time being a very effective gothic chiller.

It is 1880 and Sir Robert Cargrave (Ronald Lewis) is a celebrated London physician who has achieved outstanding success with cases of paralysis. He receives a letter from the woman with whom he had been in love. She is now married and living in central Europe. Her husband is Baron Sardonicus and he owns a castle but apparently all is not well. The message leads Cargrave to believe that the Baroness may be in real danger.

His arrival in central Europe leads us to expect a typical gothic horror plot. The villagers warn him to keep well away from the castle; they are clearly terrified of the Baron. He is met at the railway station by one of the Baron’s retainers, a man who fulfills all our expectations of gothic horror servants. Krull (Oskar Homolka) is a shambling one-eyed rather sinister character who speaks of his master in suitably awed and mysterious tones.

When he gets to the castle itself he is in for several shocks. Firstly there is a servant woman covered in leeches, the victim of what appears to be some ghastly medical experiment. Sir Robert is a modern doctor who does not approve of the use of such antiquated methods. The Baron himself provides another shock, with his face covered by a mask. When the mask is removed it reveals a face permanently frozen into a hideous grimace, a grimace so severe that he can take only liquid nourishment.

The explanation for this disfigurement reveals a shameful secret involving grave robbing.

It is clear that Baron Sardonicus and his wife are not having normal marital relations and that the Baron is indulging his passions with unfortunate peasant girls.

Sardonicus himself was responsible for luring Sir Robert to his castle - he hopes the eminent physician can cure him. It is not merely his body that requires curing - his disfigurement has made him violent, cruel and unpredictable. The cure proves to be more difficult than expected and Cargrave is blackmailed into using dangerous and untried methods.

It’s not a William Castle movie without a gimmick. This time it’s the Punishment Poll. Just before the end of the movie Castle himself interrupts proceedings to conduct a vote by the audience. Those attending the movie had been issued with a card with which they could vote on whether Sardonicus had been sufficiently punished for his misdeeds or whether further punishment was required. In fact only one ending was shot - Castle assumed that no horror movie audience would vote for mercy for the villain!

Where the movie departs from gothic horror cliché is in the role of the scientist/doctor. We expect either a mad scientist or at the very least a dangerously deluded and misguided scientist whose work leads to evil. In fact in this story the scientist is unequivocally the hero. It’s difficult to think of another gothic horror flick in which science is presented in such a positive light.

The movie is also somewhat unusual in that it not only avoids supernatural explanation, it also avoids fanciful science fictional explanations. The entire case is shown to be a perfectly realistic example of extreme psychological states, of pathological guilt in fact. There are no real monsters, only a man made monstrous by a combination of misfortune and of his own actions.

Ronald Lewis is a likeable hero, Guy Rolfe is suitably creepy as Sardonicus and Oskar Homolka steals every scene he’s in.

Castle was not an inspired director but he was thoroughly competent and he knew what audiences wanted. Mr Sardonicus is not a great movie but it’s very entertaining indeed.

Columbia have done William Castle proud with their boxed set of his movies. The transfer is superb.

Your Turn Darling (1963)

2011-11-29T08:52:00.006+11:00

Before James Bond there was Lemmy Caution. He was the hero of a whole series of French movies in the 50s and early 60s, movies that were the ancestors of both the eurospy and spy spoof movies that boomed during the 1960s. Your Turn Darling (À toi de faire... mignonne) was the seventh such movie to feature Eddie Constantine in the role.

The character was created by British hardboiled crime writer Peter Cheyney (1896-1951) and figured in ten novels between 1936 and 1945. They were hugely successful at the time and built up a major following in France. Lemmy Caution remains something of a pop culture icon there.

Eddie Constantine (1917-1993) was a gravel-voiced American-born singer and actor who spent most of his career in France and Germany. He’s best-known for his role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville in 1965, where he again played Lemmy Caution but in a very different kind of film.

Cheyney’s novels were pulpy and tongue-in-cheek and the movies captured the same feel. They’re great fun although sadly while English-dubbed versions exist there are no official English-friendly DVD releases and those that can be found are fullframe (which is not a problem with the earlier movies in the series that were shot in 1.33:1 but is a problem with the later entries in the cycle which were filmed in 2.35:1.

Lemmy Caution is an FBI agent whose cases always seem to take him to France. This time scientist Elmer Whittaker has been kidnapped, and this scientist has developed a secret formula for something terribly important and it must not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Lemmy is hot on the trail and the trail (as always) leads him to an assortment of beautiful but dangerous women. Luckily Lemmy likes beautiful but dangerous women almost as much as he likes Scotch whisky, and he likes Scotch whisky very much indeed.

The beautiful but dangerous women spend almost as much time trying to kill each other as they spend trying to kill Lemmy. The most dangerous of all is the widow of a famous Italian painter who is not what she seems to be.

Lemmy has little trouble figuring out who the kidnappers are but getting Dr Whittaker back is not so simple. The kidnappers are threatening to sell him and the formula to an unfriendly government and Lemmy has to persuade the FBI to come up with a million dollars in ransom money. He has some tricks up his sleeve but so do the kidnappers.

Compared to later spy movies there are very few gadgets and no spectacular sets or action sequences. In that respect the Lemmy Caution movies are more like the spy movies of the 40s and they’re a mix of espionage and hardboiled crime.

This is not the best of the Lemmy Caution movies by any means. The earlier films combined hardboiled dialogue, international intrigue and tongue-in-cheek humour in a balanced mix, a mix very similar to that of the later Bond movies. This time around the comedy completely predominates. You’re certainly better off starting with the earlier movies from the 50s like Poison Ivy or Dames Don't Care (both of which feature the wonderful and very exotic Dominique Wilms).

Having said that, Your Turn Darling is still good-natured fun and Eddie Constantine is always worth watching.

Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World (1961)

2011-11-26T11:51:00.006+11:00

Samson and the Seven Miracles of the World (Maciste alla corte del Gran Khan) is a peplum with a difference - it’s set in China during the 13th century.

Making a peplum set in China might seem an odd thing to do but apparently the producers of a relatively lavish movie on Marco Polo felt that it would be silly to use the sets for just one movie so they decided to use them again to make a peplum. They also had quite a few Asian actors and extras available so that made it even easier. Japanese actress Yoko Tani played the female lead in both films.

As the Italian title makes clear the hero of this movie is not in fact Samson but Maciste. Maciste is not a figure from folklore or mythology. He had been the hero of the 1914 Italian movie Cabiria, a movie that has strong claims to being the first movie epic. The character caught on so well that he ended up being the hero of countless sword and sandal movies.

So what is an Italian hero doing in China? The movie solves that problem by simply ignoring it. We just have to accept that he happens to be there. Let’s face it, if you’re going to start worrying about logic in a movie like this you’re watching the wrong type of movie.

China (or most of it) at this time was part of the enormous Mongol Empire. Garak Khan has a problem. He is acting as regent for the young Chinese crown prince and his sister Lei-ling. Of course the reality is that he runs the country and has no intention of allowing a Chinese dynasty to re-establish itself, but the Chinese prince and princess are being used as symbols of resistance by a rebel army dedicated to the overthrow of the Mongols.

Garak decides to do the obvious thing and have them killed, but just as he’s about to feed the prince to a tiger along comes Maciste and ruins everything. Maciste has made contact with the rebels and has offered to help them. The immediate problem is that Garak’s plans to murder the princess having failed he has now decided to marry her instead. To do this he will have to kidnap her.

Garak already has a girlfriend and she is not overly pleased by this new development. She was all set to become the beautiful but evil queen without which no peplum worth its salt is complete but now she’s ready to change sides and fight for goodness and justice. At least until Garak’s marriage plans fall through.

Gordon Scott plays Maciste and he’s a perfectly acceptable muscleman hero. Yoko Tani makes a reasonable princess heroine. Hélène Chanel is a fun would-be beautiful but evil queen and Leonardo Severini as Garak is the smooth but villainous Garak.

There are no supernatural elements or monsters in this movie but there’s plenty of action and mayhem, including an eight-horse scythed chariot used by Garak Khan as a novel method of executing his enemies.

Director Riccardo Freda made some excellent gothic horror films as well as many sword and sandal epics and in fact he had a go at just about every genre going including spaghetti westerns and eurospy thrillers. He was always a very capable director.

The movie itself is a terrific example of its species and is highly recommended.

The same cannot be said for Retromedia’s DVD presentation. The good news is that it’s in the correct Cinemascope aspect ratio and that’s a major plus given the number of Italian genre movies that are only available in terrible pan-and-scan fullframe versions. Unfortunately that’s the only good news. This is an absolutely abysmal print, and even worse it’s cut by about half an hour! Which means the plot is badly rushed and not entirely coherent. Picture quality is lousy.

The English dubbed version is the only soundtrack option but that’s less of a problem since bad dubbing tends to enhance this type of movie.

It’s probably not Retromedia’s fault since it may well be that there are no other surviving English dubbed or subtitled prints, and while image quality is poor it’s watchable and at least it’s not pan-and-scanned. It’s just a pity a better print could not have been found of such a very entertaining peplum.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)

2011-11-23T11:47:00.005+11:00

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell was released in 1974 but was really a throwback to an earlier era of British horror. That’s not intended as a criticism - this is classic Hammer.

This film saw Peter Cushing playing Baron Frankenstein for the last time and it was also director Terence Fisher’s final film. With music by James Bernard and a screenplay by Anthony Hinds this is like a Hammer reunion from the studio’s golden days.

As the movie opens a young doctor named Simon Helder (Shane Briant) is trying to continue the work of the late Baron Frankenstein. Frankenstein had died in a lunatic asylum some years earlier. Dr Helder is too young to have ever met the baron but he has all his books and is an eager disciple. Unfortunately the authorities remain unsympathetic to those at the cutting edge of science and Dr Helder is convicted of sorcery and committed to an asylum for the criminally insane. In fact it’s the same asylum in which Frankenstein passed his final years.

Young Simon has a major surprise in store for him. Not only is Baron Frankenstein still very much alive, he now effectively runs the asylum. He has collected enough damaging evidence against the director of the asylum (a man who is clearly both sexually depraved and mentally unstable) and most of his underlings that no-one will now dare to question his authority.

For Frankenstein it has been a congenial arrangement. He has the necessary privacy in which to continue his experiments and he has a source of human raw material. He also has a faithful assistant, a beautiful young female inmate named Sarah who is known to all as The Angel. Sarah is mute but quite sane. She has been a valuable, intelligent and capable assistant but it would obviously be very useful to have a second assistant with proper medical training. He is therefore extremely pleased to make the acquaintance of Dr Helder, and even more pleased when he discovers that the brilliant young surgeon is an admirer of his own work.

One inmate of this madhouse who had particularly attracted Frankenstein’s interest was a man who had regressed to a more primitive stage of human evolution. When he was killed trying to escape the Baron wasted no time in restoring him to life. He is now the subject of Frankenstein’s latest experiments. As always with his creatures the brain has been a problem but there happens to be another patient who is a genius, albeit an insane genius. His brain would be ideal.

Dr Helder’s enthusiasm for the work is soon tempered by ethical concerns. Frankenstein has no problems in that area. The Frankenstein of this movie is entirely lacking in anything resembling a moral sense. Frankenstein had always been inclined to allow his ambitions to overrule his conscience and this tendency has now reached an extreme. He is also now very close to complete madness.

Cushing is in fine form, giving one of his most chilling performances. Shane Briant is quite adequate, as is Madeleine Smith as Sarah. John Stratton is delightfully creepy as the asylum director while Patrick Troughton contributes an entertaining cameo as a grave robber.

The monster in this final film is more human than in most previous productions. He can speak, and he can understand his horrifying situation. David Prowse had played the monster before, in Hammer’s The Horror of Frankenstein.

Terence Fisher shows that he hadn’t lost his touch. The very low budget (a real problem for Hammer in this period) is evident but art director Scott MacGregor does a pretty good job within those constraints and the movie has a brooding claustrophobic feel that is perfect for the madhouse setting.

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell ends the Hammer Frankenstein cycle on a very satisfying note.

Grip of the Strangler (1958)

2011-11-21T11:55:00.008+11:00

Grip of the Strangler (AKA The Haunted Strangler) is a very good idea that doesn’t quite come off but it remains an interesting attempt.

American-born producer Richard Gordon rode the British horror boom fairly successfully, being responsible for a good many entertaining low-budget British horror films.

This low-budget 1958 British horror flick stars Boris Karloff as a man investigating a murder that occurred 20 years earlier. The movie opens with the hanging of Edward Styles, the Haymarket Strangler. The time period is not specified exactly but is presumably the mid-19th century. Since it’s the days when public executions were a popular spectator sport it must be some time before 1868.

A novelist named James Rankin has become obsessed with the case. He is convinced that Styles was innocent. He suspects that a young doctor named Tennant, who performed the autopsies on the strangler’s five victims as well as on the convicted man, had some involvement in the murders. Dr Tennant mysteriously disappeared from Guy’s Hospital in London shortly after the execution of Styles.

Dr Tennant had been an habitue of the Judas Hole, a rather low dive that was also the scene of at least one of the murders. One of the dancers there had been a key witness at the trial of Styles but it now becomes clear that her evidence was much less solid that it had appeared at the time.

Rankin has found personal papers belonging to Dr Tennant, papers that do suggest that Tennant was obsessed by the case to a morbid degree. He has also found Tennant’s surgical kit and believes there is some significance to the fact that a surgeon’s knife is missing from the kit. He thinks the missing knife may be in Edward Styles’ coffin

Superintendant Burk at Scotland Yard has been willing to give Rankin every assistance within reason but decides he must draw the line when Rankin insists that Styles’ body must be exhumed. Rankin bribes a prison guard at Newgate to allow him to enter the prison cemetery at night to dig up the coffin himself. He finds the knife, and he finds the answer to the puzzle, but it’s an answer that will drive him to madness.

The premise is a good one and I won’t ruin it by revealing the twist. The problem is that the movie relies a bit too much on excessive and not entirely necessary makeup effects and these tend to make the movie seem silly when it fact it isn’t. They also draw attention to the low budget and give it a cheap feel that is rather unfortunate.

This minus is more than balanced out however by some impressive pluses, the most notable being Karloff. At the age of 70 he could still deliver a powerhouse performance. The other actors are quite adequate.

The screenplay is a clever variation on one of the classic tales of gothic horror but I won’t tell you which one because this would reveal too much of the plot.

Despite the low budget it manages some effectively atmospheric moments and the black-and-white cinematography is competently handled.

Although it has its faults it’s a reasonably entertaining gothic chiller.

The all-region UK PAL DVD release from 2entertain is barebones and it’s fullframe but it looks reasonably good and it can be picked up very very cheaply.

4D Man (1959)

2011-11-19T13:53:00.005+11:00

What would happen if a scientist managed to conquer the fourth dimension? Judging by the 1959 sci-fi flick 4D Man the first thing that would happen would be that logic would fly out the window. This is an amazingly silly movie.

But then some of my favourite science fiction movies are amazingly silly. Amazingly silly is something I can live with if it’s combined with fun. 4D Man doesn’t quite make it on this score but it comes close.

Dr Tony Nelson (James Congdon) is a brilliant if erratic scientist who believes he is on the verge of an extraordinary scientific breakthrough. At one stage he managed to get a pencil to penetrate a steel plate by persuading the molecules of the pencil and the steel plate to occupy the same space at the same time. And I use the word persuaded deliberately - he did this by an act of will, aided by a force field.

Unfortunately Tony then managed to burn down his employer’s laboratory and consequently got himself fired. So he set off for another city to join his older brother Scott (Robert Lansing). Dr Scott Nelson is also a brilliant scientist although up till now he’s been more disciplined than his brother.

Scott is working at the laboratories run by Dr Theodore Carson, his current project bring the development of cargonite, a substance so tough that it is for all intents and purposes indestructible. Dr Carson has the unpleasant habit of allowing his staff to do all the work and then taking all the credit himself. Scott hasn’t been too worried by this - he’s dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and besides he’s in love with his glamorous assistant Linda Davis (Lee Meriwether) and she’s going to marry him so really he has everything he wants.

Tony’s arrival upsets all his preconceptions. As he’s done in the past Tony proceeds to steal Scott’s remarkably fickle girlfriend, and just as disturbingly Tony also announces that cargonite is not indestructible after all. Tony’s own research proves that nothing is indestructible. By harnessing the powers of the fourth dimension it is possible to concentrate years of willpower into a few seconds thus allowing any object to be penetrated.

Scott has been suffering from severe headaches and his doctor has advised him that his EEG readings are very abnormal. The shock of discovering Linda’s betrayal pushes him over the edge. He starts to work on Tony’s theories and finds that he doesn’t need the amplifier and force field that Tony has developed - he can pass into the fourth dimension at any time merely by exerting his will. In his increasingly unbalanced mental state this proves to be a dangerous discovery. Scott is out of control.

And there’s a downside to this fourth dimension stuff - it ages you. The only way to keep young is by draining the years from other people and this has the effect of killing them. I warned you that this movie was very silly!

The special effects are reasonable enough - walking through walls and that sort of thing.

Robert Lansing was a fairly competent actor and although Scott’s sudden personality change is a difficult sell he does reasonably well in the role. Tony Nelson ends up the hero but really he’s a thoroughly slimy character and James Congdon fails to make him a sympathetic hero. Lee Meriwether as Scott’s faithless girlfriend is somewhat on the dull side. Look out for a very young Patty Duke showing even then a desire to chew any scenery she can get at.

The movie’s biggest problem is the ending which seems very perfunctory.

But this is not a movie to take even remotely seriously - this is 50s American science fiction and no-one should expect it to make sense. Just settle back and enjoy the campy ridiculous fun.

This DVD release is not one of Image Entertainment’s prouder moments. In fact it’s a thoroughly lousy DVD. It’s full frame and picture quality is very poor. So although the movie is fun the DVD is so awful it can’t possibly be recommended.

Witches' Hammer (1970)

2011-11-17T11:59:00.009+11:00

Witch-hunting has always been a popular subject for both art-house and exploitation films in most countries. There are many well-known examples from British, American and European film-makers. Witches' Hammer (Kladivo na carodejnice), made in Czechoslovakia in 1969, is a rare example of such a movie from behind the Iron Curtain.

Writer-director Otakar Vávra already had a long career behind him when he made Witches' Hammer in 1969 (it was released in January 1970). And he had a long career still in front of him - his final film was released in 2003. He died in 2011, aged 100.

He’d lived through countless changes of regime. When he was born his birthplace in Bohemia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the late 30s it was under the control of the Nazis. By the time he reached middle age the horrors of the Nazi regime had given way to the horrors of communism. He outlived all those regimes. He survived, and managed to go on making movies for more than seventy years.

This is one case where it’s absolutely essential to know the historical background to a film. The tentative moves towards freedom in Czechoslovakia, the so-called Prague Spring, had been brutally crushed by the Soviets in 1968 and hardline communism reinstated. It’s impossible to believe that any Czech film-maker could have chosen witch-hunting and the Inquisition as subject matter in 1969 without there being a political intent to the film. And in later life director Otakar Vávra made it clear that that was indeed his intention, that the movie is really about the oppressiveness of the communist regime.

The plot is your basic witch-hunt plot. The time is the late 17th century. An old woman is spotted stealing a consecrated host from a church. The priest immediately suspects that witch-craft is afoot. After consultations with the local grandees the fateful decision is made to call in the Inquisition.

The problem here being that calling in the Inquisition is relatively easy but getting rid of them is next to impossible. Accusation follows accusation, the number of convicted witches sentenced to burning grows steadily, and soon it is obvious that no-one is safe. A number of local notables are concerned, the priest who stared the ball rolling is sure that most of the victims are in fact innocent, but anyone who questions the activities of the Inquisitor risks being accused of witchcraft himself. If you doubt the guilt of the accused witches then you must be a witch, just as anyone who doubted the guilt of the victims of the Stalinist show trials automatically came under suspicion.

The acting is generally good. Vladimír Smeral as the Inquisitor Boblig is a frightening study in evil and hypocrisy, more interested in enriching himself and cementing his own power than in anything else. He’s the sort of person who would have been equally successful as a Party apparatchik in the mid-20th century. Elo Romancik gives a moving performance as Deacon Lautner, a man with the courage to stand up to the Inquisition but unfortunately also a man with a guilty secret.

The film was shot in black-and-white and looks extraordinarily bleak. The mood of the film is every bit as grim. 1969 being an incredibly grim time in Czech history that’s probably not surprising. There’s not a great deal of hope on offer here.

While the movie’s real subject is what was happening in Czechoslovakia after the suppression of the Prague Spring it’s also an effective indictment of the witch-hunting mentality in general making it as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. That witch-hunting mentality is still alive and well.

It’s not exactly enjoyable but it is a powerful film. This is an art-house rather than an exploitation flick but there’s copious nudity and there are plenty of grisly scenes.

It’s been released on DVD by an outfit called Facets Video. It’s a so-so transfer. The liner notes (by Susan Doll) are informative but that’s the only extra included.

Scars of Dracula (1970)

2011-11-14T23:08:00.005+11:00

The first time I saw Scars of Dracula I regarded it as one of Hammer’s lesser films. A second viewing conforms that impression, although it’s not without entertainment value.

Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1970 had tried to take the Hammer Dracula cycle in a slightly different direction. Scars of Dracula, which followed later the same year, is by comparison a bit of a step backwards. Plotwise it’s a straightforward by-the-numbers Hammer gothic movie.

Paul Carlson is turned away from the local inn and decides to try his luck at the nearby castle. He finds a bed for the night there but since this is Castle Dracula its not altogether surprising that the young man is not heard from again. His brother Simon (Dennis Waterman) sets off to find him. There’s really not much more to the plot than that.

While the plot is less than inspired there are a few elements that do mark a slight departure from earlier Hammer movies, most notably the gore factor. This was Hammer’s goriest movie to date, and it’s also in general the most brutal of their vampire flicks. Dracula really is a nasty piece of work in this movie with a decided penchant for sadistic violence. One of his chief victims is his loyal servant Klove (Patrick Troughton). As Christopher Lee quite correctly remarks in the accompanying commentary track, Klove’s willing complicity in this treatment makes this the most explicitly sado-masochistic of Hammer’s movies. It also makes Klove one of the more interesting of the various underlings who have served the Count in the course of Hammer’s Dracula series.

There’s also a rather shocking post-massacre scene, once again emphasising the extreme evil of Dracula.

The character of Dracula is much more centre stage than in most of the Hammer Dracula films. There’s even a scene of the Count climbing the walls of the castle, just as in Stoker’s novel.

The supporting cast is a mixed bag. Dennis Waterman is terrible, Jenny Hanley is dull, Anouska Hempel as Dracula’s vampire bride looks exotic enough while Patrick Troughton goes close to stealing the movie. Michael Ripper is as reliable as always, playing yet another innkeeper.

The special effects are reasonable, apart from the bats. They’re among the most embarrassingly bad movie bats you’ll ever see.

More interesting than the movie itself is the commentary track, featuring both director Roy Ward Baker and star Christopher Lee. Christopher Lee is in quite a jovial mood and manages to be remarkably positive about both this particular movie and about Hammer in general. His one serious criticism is that Hammer failed to take advantage of the potentialities of the character of Dracula and he is of course absolutely correct on that score. Aside from that he’s chatty and amusing. Both Lee and Baker offer trenchant (and entirely valid) criticisms of the state of modern horror and of the modern British film industry.

Overall Scars of Dracula is not one of Hammer’s better efforts but in its own way it’s reasonably enjoyable.

Hot Thrills and Warm Chills (1967)

2011-11-14T09:58:00.006+11:00

You don’t really expect 1960s sexploitation movies to make a huge amount of sense. Hot Thrills and Warm Chills does have a plot, of sorts, it just happens to be a very silly plot. But silliness and weirdness are all part of the appeal of this particular genre and this movie qualifies on both counts.

Toni (Tita Alexander) used to be the leader of a very successful girl gang. Now she gets together with two of her former gang cohorts to make one last big score. It’s Mardi Gras time and they’re going to steal the crown of King Sex.

Toni has it all planned out so that nothing can possibly go wrong, but of course everything does go wrong and eventually the girls take refuge in a cemetery.

The plot occupies a minority of the movie’s running time. The rest of the movie comprises the girls’ reminiscences of various sexual encounters. That and an extended topless dance sequence that has absolutely no connection with the rest of the movie takes up the rest of the movie.

The soundtrack is indescribably bizarre. Continuity is non-existent. The script is filled with jaw-dropping dialogue.

The acting is terrible, but it’s entertainingly terrible. And as its star it has the amazing Rita Alexander. Among her claims to fame is the ability to balance a champagne glass on her breasts, a feat she demonstrates in the opening sequence. She really is wonderful - she’s totally over-the-top and delightfully larger-than-life.

Director Dale Berry was a Texas-based sexploitation film-maker active in the mid to late 60s and Hot Thrills and Warm Chills is presented as part of a two-movie set from Something Weird Video showcasing his inimitable works. The other featured movie is Hip, Hot and 21 and it’s just as strange.

As usual Something Weird have managed to find pretty decent prints of these bizarre obscurities and there are various shorts and trailers to complete the package.

While it's not one of the great American sexploitation movies this one is still worth a look if you're a fan of the genre.

The Terminal Man (1974)

2011-11-12T20:56:00.007+11:00

The 1970s had already seen two smash-hit science fiction thrillers based on the novels of Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain and Westworld, so when The Terminal Man was released in 1974 it must have looked like a sure thing in box-office terms. In fact it bombed quite badly. It’s not difficult to see why.

The premise is mildly interesting but had already been done, and done infinitely better, A Clockwork Orange. Harry Benson (George Segal) has violent seizures that turn him into a homicidal maniac at regular intervals. After the attacks he is left with no memory of the event whatsoever. A team of clever scientist chappies has come up with a sure-fire cure - they will implant a computer in the man’s brain to control the seizures.

Psychiatrist Dr Janet Ross (Joan Hackett) has her doubts. Right from the start the movie makes it clear it’s taking the classic anti-science approach so familiar from countless previous movies.

A potentially interesting element that is left completely unexplored is that Benson is a computer scientist who suffers from paranoid delusions about - computers! He believes they’re going to take over the world.

Predictably the surgery goes horribly wrong and it all turns into a messy disaster.

A Clockwork Orange (both Anthony Burgess’s novel and Stanley Kubrick’s film) make all sorts of provocative points about free will, the rights of the individual compared to the rights of society, the nature of violence and evil and the dangers of forcibly changing human behaviour. Unfortunately the writer-director of The Terminal Man, Mike Hodges, is content with little more than platitudes about technology turning us into machines. The fact that Harry’s violent episodes are presented as being entirely out of his control makes for an uninteresting movie. His personality is therefore irrelevant and he is a mere victim of the wicked capitalist medical-scientific conspiracy to control our minds.

Nothing is too obvious for Hodges. The police are brutal killers. The doctors and scientists are evil, greedy and uncaring. The system will destroy everyone. You can’t win. This is classic 1970s whining adolescent self-pity in full cry and it’s not a pretty sight.

George Segal tries hard but the script gives him nothing to work with. We know nothing about him, his personality remains a blank, and it is almost impossible to care what happens to him. He is further handicapped by having to wear an absurd wig for most of the movie (a disguise he dons to make his escape from the hospital). This has the effect of making the whole movie seem like a crude joke.

Joan Hackett is adequate as Dr Ross although once again the inept script fails to make her anything more than the stereotypical Caring Woman Psychiatrist.

Robert Wise (who directed The Andromeda Strain) and Michael Crichton himself (who directed Westworld) understood that a science fiction thriller
needs a balance of ideas and excitement. Hodges gives us neither.

The visual style of the movie is the one moderately interesting thing about it. The movie has a bleak antiseptic monochromatic feel to it. It’s reasonably effective but it’s scarcely original. Hodges does come up with a few striking images that might have had some impact but they’re wasted on a story that nobody is likely to care about.

This one is available in the made-on-demand Warner Archive DVD-R series and it’s a good quality print.

Our Man Flint (1966)

2011-11-10T12:58:00.007+11:00

The enormous success of the first James Bond movies launched an avalanche of copies, clones, rip-offs and spoofs. Among the more successful of the American efforts in this regard were the two Derek Flint movies. The first of these was Our Man Flint, released in 1966.

What I find really surprising about this movie is just how hostile most of the online reviews are. Perhaps it just shows how humourless our world has become. But when I find reviewers comparing it unfavourably to the horrendously laboured Austin Powers movies I really start to fear for the future of our civilisation. Our Man Flint has an easy-going charm and an effortless quality that Austin Powers sadly lacks.

The weak point to Our Man Flint is the premise. Mad scientists aiming at world domination by controlling the weather was a cliché even in 1966. The movie does add an amusing and original twist even here though - these are mad scientists who are also into the whole peace and love vibe. They want world domination so everyone can be happy. They’re diabolical criminal mastermind hippies who promise a world of free love and go-go dancing.

Derek Flint (James Coburn) is a former intelligence agent who has quit the spy game to devote himself to pleasure. He lives a life of luxury in a love nest made for five. Even James Bond never managed four girlfriends at once. Now his former boss, Cramden (Lee J. Cobb), has to try to lure him back for another assignment for ZOWIE (Zonal Organisation for World Intelligence and Espionage). Flint turns him down but changes his mind when someone tries to kill him. Flint is being hunted by a glamorous female agent employed by the mad scientists. Her job is to kill him but she’s too overcome by his manly charms to actually want him dead.

The plot isn’t really the point of the movie. It’s all about the style and the wit, and it has plenty of that. I suspect that a lot of the people who’ve reviewed this movie unfavourably have taken it too seriously. The island headquarters of the bad guys includes a pleasure zone populated by women programmed as love slaves. How anyone could fail to realise that this is not male wish fulfillment, it’s a joke, is beyond me.

Flint is not just a secret agent. He’s a polymath, an art connoisseur, a gourmet, an authority on every conceivable subject and of course he’s irresistible to women. The bad guys really don’t have a chance, but then this is a spoof, and it’s the invulnerable infallible hero that it’s spoofing. James Coburn gets the tone just right and avoids the obvious danger of becoming annoying by being so perfect. He’s so obviously not taking any of this seriously, and he doesn’t overplay it.

Lee J. Cobb is an odd choice for what is essentially a lighthearted comic role but he manages reasonably well.

The sets are a major plus. They’re not just the usual secret laboratory/secret criminal headquarters sets - the mad scientists’ island is like a combination of secret laboratory and discotheque. There’s even a mock drive-in theatre in the pleasure zone where couples can experience the ultimate in sensual delights - necking at the drive-in.

While this is strictly a fun romp it’s also an amusing satire of well-meaning but deluded idealists who want to make the world perfect, as long as it’s their idea of perfection. That’s about as close as this film ever gets to anything even remotely approaching a serious message.

The DVD presentation is adequate. It’s available in a two-movie set along with the second Flint movie, In Like Flint. The transfer is good and it’s in the correct ’scope aspect ratio but there are no extras apart from a trailer.

This movie has submarines, silly gadgets, explosions, a secret headquarters inside a volcano, trained attack eagles and go-go dancing. What’s not to like?

De Sade (1969)

2011-11-08T11:29:00.007+11:00

That De Sade fails is not at all surprising. What is surprising is that it’s a more interesting failure than you might expect.

This 1969 production was a very ambitious undertaking for American International Pictures, with a prestige cast and elaborate sets and costumes. It’s also artistically ambitious.

It suffers from having been an AIP production and having been made in 1969. Much as I love AIP’s movies in general a biopic on the Marquis de Sade was an impossible project for them. It was too self-consciously arty for the drive-in crowd (AIP’s main audience) but at the same time not quite arty enough for the art-house crowd. And in 1969 it was always going to prove impossible to resist the temptation to get all psychedelic with the Divine Marquis. He comes across as being a misunderstood hippie. He just wanted people to be free, man. And to live authentically. But the establishment kept hassling him.

Writer Richard Matheson intended the entire movie to be a kind of dream reminiscence by de Sade on his deathbed but while director Cy Endfield more or less sticks to this plan his approach is a little too linear and too conventional to really capture that dream quality that Matheson was after. The play-within-a-play aspect works reasonably well but might have been more effective had it been pushed a bit further.

Keir Dullea was a bold casting choice as de Sade. It doesn’t quite come off. He’s too young, doesn’t look dissipated enough and doesn’t have the necessary edge. On the other hand it’s an interesting performance, and in some ways I like the fact that he plays de Sade as an ineffectual and really rather harmless and silly intellectual. After all, whatever crimes he may have imagined in his writings the Marquis was in real life mostly harmless. This was a man who was sacked as a judge by the Revolutionary government because he couldn’t bring himself to impose the death sentence.

I also rather like the chaotic feel to the much-criticised orgy sequences. This was after all what the Enlightenment led to - a mindless orgy of violence and chaos that set Europe on the path to Buchenwald and to the gulags and eventually to the greatest horror of all, postmodernism. If you want to understand the failure of western civilisation then reading de Sade is a good start. He was the first of a series of European intellectuals who devoted their lives to trashing their own civilisation, paving the way for Freud, Marx, Foucault and the postmodern rabble in general. Don’t get me wrong, I think that in his own way de Sade is an important writer - he’s important because he represents the dark side to the Enlightenment.

The acting is generally of a very high order. Lilli Palmer is terrific as de Sade’s mother-in-law from Hell. She’s so civilised and yet so monstrous, but then dealing with a son-in-law like de Sade would have been no picnic. Anna Massey is superb as his unfortunate wife while Senta Berger is solid as her sister, the woman de Sade actually loved and wanted to marry. The film could be accused of turning the Marquis’ life into a love story. The film certainly wants us to believe that de Sade’s excesses were at least partly a result of thwarted love.

And then there’s John Huston, gleefuly stealing the picture as de Sade’s wicked lecherous uncle who sets his nephew on the road to depravity.

The philosophical implications of de Sade’s work don’t get a lot of attention in the film and when it does try to tackle such issues it does so in a way that is much too 1960s.

The DVD includes an interview with Matheson. The most interesting part of this is his revelation that John Huston was apparently disappointed he wasn’t asked to direct the picture! Now that might have been an interesting movie. I suspect Huston would have taken a bolder approach than Endfield. I can’t really imagine a Huston-directed de Sade biopic but it’s something to ponder.

Overall this movie is an interesting mess that often misses its target spectacularly but then at other times it unexpectedly comes up with the goods. It at least avoids the mistake of trying to make de Sade a conventional villain or a rebel hero, instead depicting him as a man whose view of the world is a mixture of insight and delusion.

A failure certainly but worth a look.

The Changeling (1980)

2011-11-06T01:19:00.007+11:00

The Changeling was an attempt at a haunted house movie and if you were going to compile a list of all the mistakes you could make that would render such a movie ineffective then this one ticks every box.

George C. Scott stars as John Russell, a professor of music whose wife and daughter are killed in a freak car accident. He slowly starts pulling himself together and feeling that a change of scenery might help he accepts a teaching position in Seattle. At first he seems he’s made a great choice. Through his contacts in the faculty he is able to rent a glorious (and huge) old house from the local historical society. It’s perfect, giving him the peace and quiet he needs for his work (he’s a composer as well as teaching music). And the lady from the historical society (played by Scott’s real-life wife Trish van Devere) is rather nice and a friendship is growing up between them.

Everything would be fine except for the pesky ghost in the attic. It soon becomes obvious that John has not recovered from his personal tragedy as well as he’d thought. He’s a bit of an emotional mess and, perhaps because of this vulnerability, he’s also inclined to be remarkably ready to accept supernatural explanations for the odd goings-on in the house.

He makes a call to the local psychic research expert and is put in touch with a medium and soon it’s séance time. This ghost is very anxious to communicate and before long John is busily digging up people’s floorboards looking for murdered bodies and what he uncovers is a scandalous conspiracy from the past.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like subtle horror. I much prefer it to the more obvious kind. I dislike gore. Give me atmosphere and a slow building of suspense and dread any day. It has to be said however that it is possible to be too subtle. At some point you have to get scary. And in this movie it just doesn’t happen.

Even worse there is never any sense that the two main protagonists (John Russell and his new lady friend) are in real danger from the ghost. And there’s no-one else in the movie that we can possibly be expected to care about.

The movie’s flaws don’t end there. Too much of the explanation for the haunting is given away too soon and the explanation is banal and predictable. The villains are obvious and are such tedious clichés that their evil is too boring to make any emotional impact.

The whole movie has a bad TV movie feel to it, both visually and in the ineptness of the scripting and the flatness of the direction. The big horror set-pieces towards the end are silly and distinctly non-scary. Director Peter Medak has spent most of his subsequent undistinguished career in television.

George C. Scott is adequate but he doesn’t seem overly interested. No-one else in the cast makes any impression at all.

This one is not even worth a rental I’m afraid.

The UK DVD from Optimum looks OK but has no extras at all.

The Young Master (1980)

2011-11-04T08:38:00.003+11:00

I’ve never been a huge fan of martial arts movies but I have slowly developed quite a love for the movies of Shaw Brothers Studio. I’m less familiar with the output of the major producer of Hong Kong action movies, Golden Harvest. After seeing The Young Master I’m inclined to think I might stick to Shaw Brothers productions in future.

This was Jackie Chan’s triumphant return to Golden Harvest and he wrote and directed the movie as well as starring in it.

I must confess that I have only the haziest notion of what the plot as all about. Two orphans, Tiger and Dragon, had been taken in and raised by the master of a kung fu school. Tiger betrayed his master by helping a rival school to win the lion dance competition, and was banished in disgrace. His master later relented and sent Dragon (Jackie Chan) to fetch him back.

Somehow the plot then gets involved with bank robbers and with Dragon being mistaken for an escaped criminal. The action sequences are non-stop and there’s little time for coherent plot development, but then coherent plot development is probably not what the audience for this film was going to paying their money to see.

It’s mostly played for comedy and the comedy is very broad and relies a good deal on slapstick. It’s a style of comedy that has never done much for me and as a result I found this movie to be pretty heavy going. Of course if you enjoy this type of humour your reaction to the movie is probably going to be quite different. It’s just a matter of personal taste.

The fight scenes are frenetic and spectacular enough but they lack the elegance of the fight scenes in Shaw Brothers movies. Again it’s a matter of personal taste.

The acting is as broad as the comedy. Jackie Chan is likeable enough.

I don’t want to put people off because really my fairly negative response to this film is mostly due to the fact that this sort of movie is just not my cup of tea.

Pilot X (Death in the Air)

2011-11-02T12:41:00.006+11:00

Pilot X (also known as Death in the Air) is a mystery thriller, but it’s odd enough to be of interest to cult movie fans. Any movie that combines aerial dogfights, a murder mystery, a love story and psychiatry is a winner in my book. And being the 1930s (it actually came out in 1936) the psychiatry is in the form of delightfully half-baked Hollywood Freudianism, so that’s another major plus!

It was produced by an obscure Poverty Row studio. Director Elmer Clifton had been making pictures since 1915, most of them evidently low-budget efforts including hordes of B-westerns. His career had started promisingly but by the end of the silent era he had become strictly a B-movie director.

Passenger aircraft in the US are mysteriously disappearing. It soon becomes evident that even though it’s peacetime, they’re being shot down. By an insane pilot identified only by the huge X painted on his aircraft’s wings. Several of the downed planes belong to an American aircraft manufacturer rather unfortunately (this was 1936 remember) known as Mr Goering. He hires US Army pilot and part-time amateur detective Jerry Blackwood to track down the mad killer, with some assistance from psychiatrist Dr Norris. Dr Norris decides it’s a case of war-time neurosis, an air ace who is driven to keep increasing his score of kills even after the war is over.

It transpires that there just happen to be five wartime air aces living in the neighbourhood so they are all invited to participate in the hunt for the crazed killer, who is presumably one of their number. They are all invited to base themselves at Mr Goering’s house while they fly patrols looking for Pilot X.

The acting is wonderfully bad even by B-movie standards, but the concept is so pulpy that it just adds to the enjoyment.

The aerial sequences are reasonably impressive - in fact by low-budget movie standards very impressive. The murder mystery is at least moderately clever. Of course it goes without saying that the aircraft manufacturer has a beautiful daughter (OK, in this case she’s his ward, but she fulfills the same plot functions) and naturally she becomes involved in a romantic triangle between Mr Goering’s son and Jerry Blackwood.

There’s also a memorable mad scene of operatic proportions involving one of the air aces, an RAF flyer with a very bad case of shell-shock. It’s all very silly but it’s fairly well-paced, it’s off-beat and it’s highly entertaining if you accept on strictly B-movie terms. It’s certainly worth a look.

It’s released on DVD by Alpha Video and it’s also available for download at various sites (quite legally since It’s a public domain movie).

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

2011-10-31T11:24:00.009+11:00

Hammer Films had been around for quite a while and had enjoyed considerable success with their excellent 1955 science fiction horror offering The Quatermass Xperiment but it was The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957 that really put them on the map, and in the process relaunched gothic horror as a profitable movie genre.

Terence Fisher had already helmed many movies for Hammer including a couple of science fiction films and a superb and somewhat gothic-influenced film noir, Stolen Face. He was an obvious choice to direct Hammer’s most ambitious project to date. Hammer has decided to redo the most famous of the Universal monster movies of the 30s, but in colour and widescreen and with rather more sex and violence. It proved to be an extremely astute decision, and Hammer’s choice of Fisher as director and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as the stars was equally inspired.

With Jimmy Sangster writing the screenplay and Bernard Robinson as production designer Hammer had assembled what was to prove a formidable creative team.

The plot of The Curse of Frankenstein does not stick too closely to Mary Shelley’s novel or to Universal’s 1931 version. Which was probably just as well. The enormous success of the film was due to the fact that it felt like a completely fresh approach to the gothic horror genre.

In this new version Baron Frankenstein’s assistant is his former tutor. Paul Krempe had been his willing collaborator until Frankenstein’s experiments started to become more extreme, and his methods more morally dubious. Paul stays only because he is afraid to leave Frankenstein’s beautiful cousin and intended bride Elizabeth alone in the house with the increasingly obsessive Baron. Paul tries to persuade Frankenstein of the danger posed by his latest experiment, the creation of an artificial creature made up of assorted body parts, but to no avail.

Paul’s efforts to stop the Baron result in damage to the brain that has been earmarked for the creature. This not only has disastrous consequences for the creature - it also pushes Frankenstein even closer to the edge of madness as he blames Paul for sabotaging his great experiment.

The most revolutionary thing about this version is Peter Cushing’s performance as Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s book and most film adaptations raise the question as to who is the real monster, Frankenstein or the creature he has created, but in this version there’s absolutely no question at all - it’s Frankenstein who is the monster.

And he’s not an idealistic scientist who gradually succumbs to the temptation to play God, nor is he a well-meaning essentially good man who slowly loses his moral compass as his experiments get out of hand. With Cushing’s Frankenstein it’s clear that the seeds of madness and evil were there right from the start. Right from the beginning of his scientific career he was prepared to pursue ends and to utilise means that were not just morally dubious - they were clearly and unequivocally immoral.

While Boris Karloff had endowed the creature with a certain dignity and made him rather sympathetic in Hammer’s version Christopher Lee’s creature is a pathetic shambling wreck, a hideous reflection of the moral vacuum in its creator’s soul. The focus in this film is entirely on Frankenstein, and on the character flaws that drive him to destruction and disaster. It’s an acting tour-de-force by Cushing. In the later Hammer Frankenstein films the Baron would at times be portrayed in more equivocal terms and Cushing arguably gave more nuanced performances but the sheer power of his performance in the 1957 film is breath-taking.

The first half hour is a little on the slow side but after that the pace picks up and Fisher is in complete control. Some of his earlier films are extremely good but it’s clear that gothic horror was the perfect genre for his talents and his mastery is already evident here.

It’s not my favourite movie of the Hammer Frankenstein cycle but it was certainly an impressive beginning.

Warner’s DVD release can’t really be faulted so far as the transfer is concerned although the lack of worthwhile extras is a little disappointing.

The Creeping Flesh (1973)

2011-10-29T22:33:00.006+11:00

The Creeping Flesh looks superficially like a fairly typical Hammer gothic horror flick, and mostly it is, although in fact it was made by Tigon Pictures rather than Hammer. With Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing heading the cast and Freddie Francis directing this is a solid effort with a few interesting features that make it worth seeking out.

Peter Cushing was always at his best playing mad scientists, and Professor Emmanuel Hildern is certainly eccentric if perhaps not actually mad. He’s a much more kindly character than Cushing’s Dr Frankenstein from the Hammer Frankenstein films, and that is in some ways the professor’s downfall. He really wants to do good. He is obsessed with the idea of evil as a disease, a disease than can be cured. It might even be possible to inoculate people against evil. His obsession stems from personal tragedy. His wife, a music hall star, has been confined to an asylum for the criminally insane for many years. he is terrified that the madness might be passed on to his daughter Penelope.

The asylum is run by his half-brother, James Hildern (Christopher Lee). James is also involved in scientific investigations into the nature of madness. He has always been somewhat in his older brother’s shadow professionally but Emmanuel has become increasingly isolated from the scientific community (apart from his ideas on evil he also holds eccentric opinions on human evolution). Emmanuel’s star is fading while James’s is rising.

Emmanuel has brought back a skeleton from an expedition to New Guinea, a skeleton he believes will restore his standing in the word of science. This skeleton seems to have some very unusual properties - when exposed to water it grows new flesh. Emmanuel thinks New Guinea folklore may hold the key to this mystery, and that the skeleton is a representative of pure evil. As such the blood (for it grows blood vessels as well as flesh) could be used to manufacture a vaccine against evil.

Of course things go horribly wrong. Emmanuel receives word that his wife has finally died. His daughter believed that her mother died many years earlier and when she discovers the truth she does not take it well. Emmanuel has tried, perhaps too hard, to shelter her from the world. Now he will pay the price for his mistake.

Emmanuel Hildern is not an evil mad scientist but his own obsessions have clouded his judgment very badly, and his isolation from the scientific mainstream has made him increasingly prone to idiosyncratic and even deluded ideas. Cushing is very much the star and he gives an impressive and rather subtly nuanced performance.

Christopher Lee as James is almost as interesting. If personal tragedy and scientific neglect have distorted Emmanuel’s character then ambition and jealousy of his more famous elder brother has also distorted James’ mind. He dreams of winning a major scientific prize and he is prepared to adopt very unethical methods in order to do so. He’s a delightfully smarmy and sinister villain and Lee has a great time with the role.

Lorna Heilbron is superb as Penelope, the daughter who becomes an unwitting victim of her father’s unwise experiments. Her descent into madness is quite chilling.

Freddie Francis was always a reliable enough horror director and on rare occasions when a story really engaged his interest he could be quite inspired. He has some very good moments in this production. He was of course more famous as a cinematographer than as a director and this background allows him to pull off a couple of good visual set-pieces, especially the flashback sequence of Emmanuel’s wife’s mental breakdown. Francis’s use of distorted images is both visually impressive and a very economical and effective way of filling in the backstory.

By the standards of 1973 it’s rather tame - no nudity, very little gore.

All in all it’s a pretty decent gothic horror effort, and certainly worth getting hold of if you’re a fan of Cushing and Lee.

Columbia Tristar’s DVD is a satisfactory widescreen release although some extras would have been nice.

The She-Beast (1966)

2011-10-27T11:12:00.007+11:00

Michael Reeves has a huge reputation among horror fans, a reputation based entirely on one film, Witchfinder General. It was his third and final film before his death at the age of 25. His second movie, The Sorcerers, is less known but is an underrated gem. Sadly the same cannot be said for his 1966 debut film, The She-Beast (La Sorella di Satana).

The She-Beast was made in Italy. Reeves, whose ambition and determination to break into directing were breath-taking, apparently turned up one day with a suitcase containing £17,000 of his own money and announced that he intended to make a movie. His friend Ian Ogilvy would star (in fact Ogilvy appeared in all three of Reeves’ movies), but Ogilvy was completely unknown and he needed a big name to attract some attention, In Italy the biggest name in horror was Barbara Steele and somehow he persuaded her to do it (she has no idea how he did it since she has only the haziest recollection of making the film). Steele was paid $1,000 for one day’s work but wasn’t told that it was going to be a very very long day’s shooting, 22 hours in fact!

Reeves had a screenplay already but Amos Powell was brought in as a kind of script doctor. In fact the script arguably needed a whole team of script doctors and that’s just one of the problems with this movie.

So, the plot. We open with the execution of a witch in Translyvania, and as is traditional in horror flicks she makes use of her dying breath to curse the villagers and their descendants. Two hundred years later a young English couple, Veronica (Barbara Steele) and Philip (Ian Ogilvy) decide that Translyvania would be a wonderfully romantic place to spend their honeymoon.

Their hotel is a bit of a disappointment. It’s basically a hovel. They decide to make the most of it and pretty soon they’re doing what you’d expect a honeymooning couple to be doing but the mood is somewhat spoilt when Veronica notices that the hotel manager (who rejoices in the name of Ladislav Groper) is watching them through the window. In a fit of righteous husbandly indignation Philip beats up Groper. Groper takes his revenge by sabotaging their car and on the following day they end up driving into the lake Philip escapes but Veronica is drowned.

At least that’s what is assumed to have happened, but the corpse seems to have disappeared. On the previous day they had encountered an eccentric local nobleman named Count von Helsing. His family were hereditary vampire and witch hunters. He now informs Philip that Veronica can still be saved.

The biggest problem here is that it’s not really clear what Reeves is trying to achieve. It’s obviously not meant to be taken as a straightforward horror movie. It’s obviously meant mostly as a comedy. I suspect he was trying for the Theatre of the Absurd feel that Polanski captured so well in his early films like Knife in the Water and more particularly Cul-de-Sac (which came out in the same year as The She-Beast). Reeves was an obsessive cinephile so he was probably familiar with Knife in the Water. That absurdist feel is all very well but to maintain it in a comedy you need to keep the humour fairly dark, but then we’re treated to a pure Keystone Kops chase sequence which doesn’t fit.

There’s also a fair amount of satire here although I’m not sure exactly who his main targets were, the communist regimes of eastern Europe or British tourists.

Horror comedy is not easy to pull off successfully and Reeves just wasn’t experienced enough to do it. It has its moments but really it’s only worth watching for curiosity value.

Dark Sky’s DVD release is truly superb when compared to the earlier DVD appearances of this movie which were atrocious. The commentary track features both Ian Ogilvy and Barbara Steele and is more entertaining than the movie.

Stoney (1969)

2011-10-26T00:45:00.009+11:00

I bought Code Red’s double-feature DVD Stoney/The Killer Likes Candy on the assumption that these were eurospy flicks, a genre of which I’m very fond. In fact Stoney (AKA Surabaya Conspiracy) hails from the Philippines and isn’t really a spy movie. It’s still worth a look.

Made in 1969, it’s more of a heist movie but with a background of international intrigue that makes it at the very least a first cousin of the spy thriller.

The details of the plot are somewhat murky and convoluted and there are so many players all trying to double-cross one another that it’s easy to lose track of exactly where everyone fits in.

Harvey Ward (Michael Rennie) is a businessman with various interests in the East, almost all of them illegal. Gunrunning is one of his businesses. Now he’s got wind of a possible fortune in buried treasure. During the war the Japanese had looted the vaults of various Dutch banks in Indonesia (or the Dutch East Indies as it then was). A Japanese general serving a long prison sentence for war crimes has revealed the hiding place of the loot. It’s an enormous fortune, and Harvey Ward wants it.

Ward doesn’t like getting to personally involved so he sends his mistress Irene Stone (known to her friends as Stoney) to make arrangements to have this loot smuggled out of the Indonesian city of Surabaya. Her qualifications for the mission seem to be that she’s extremely beautiful and thus finds it fairly easy to persuade men to do what she wants them to do, and her ethics are exceptionally flexible.

Steven Blessing, who appears to be a kind of freelance adventurer and who happens to be an old acquaintance of Stoney’s, is also on the trail of the treasure. Other players include Indonesian government officials and a guerilla army. Things have the potential to get messy, and that’s exactly what happens. Much mayhem ensues.

Before we get to the mayhem we get the sex and the glamour. Stoney has been negotiating with a very senior Indonesian official who introduces her to the glamorous side of life in Surabaya. He also hopes to make her his mistress. Stoney is more interested in bedding the hunky Steven Blessing. These are characters who find it easy to combine the pleasures of flirtation with the fine art of the double-cross.

Once the heist is under way the action starts and it’s fairly relentless. The body count is prodigious. The movie was morally pretty dark to begin with and it gets steadily more cynical as it goes.

Mike Preston plays Steven Blessing and while he’s not the world’s greatest actor he’s competent enough. He doesn’t have the charm you expect of a protagonist in a movie of this sort but that makes him slightly more interesting. Whether he’s the good guy or the bad guy is a moot point. It depends on who’s paying him. But he’s the closest the movie has to a hero. He does have some redeeming features.

The movie’s biggest asset is Barbara Bouchet as Stoney. Apart from adding considerable glamour she gives a nicely cynical performance with some amusing tongue-in-cheek moments. Some viewers might also be interested in the fact that she doesn’t keep her clothes on for the whole film.

Technically it’s surprisingly good given that it was presumably made on a shoestring budget. This was Wray Davis’s only directing credit but he does a reasonable job.

If you’re prepared to make allowances for this being a very cheap movie trying desperately to jump on any bandwagon that happened to be passing then it’s actually fairly entertaining.

There’s some print damage but on the whole (considering the obscurity of the movie) the picture quality is quite acceptable, and it is in the correct 2.35:1 aspect ratio.

Hannie Caulder (1971)

2011-10-24T05:01:00.007+11:00

During their very brief existence Tigon British Films were responsible for some of the very best gothic horror films ever made, including Witchfinder-General and Blood on Satan's Claw. In 1971 they decided to try their hands at what was in effect a British spaghetti western. I guess you could call it a bangers-and-mash western. The movie was Hannie Caulder and it’s definitely worth a look.

Spaghetti westerns tended to focus rather heavily on the revenge theme. The twist in Hannie Caulder is that it’s not about a man seeking revenge when his wife and children get murdered, it’s about a woman doing the same thing. Three rather incompetent but very violent bandits, the Clemens brothers, on the run after a bungled bank robbery, kill Hannie Caulder’s husband and rape her. Now Hannie (Raquel Welch) intends to hunt them down and kill them.

The plan starts to take shape in her mind after a chance encounter with bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price (Robert Culp). As bounty hunters go he’s a fairly nice guy. He’s the kind of bounty hunter you could take home to meet Mother. Well, sort of. Hannie tries to persuade him to teach her to be a killer. At first he refuses, mainly because he really doesn’t want to see her get hurt. When he discovers what actually happened to her he changes his mind. He realises it’s something she has to do, and he intends to make sure she’s equipped to do it successfully.

The bulk of the film is taken up by Hannie’s training. Price gets his gunsmith friend Bailey (Christopher Lee) to make custom-made guns for her. Then she’s ready for the showdown.

The plot is one that became more or less standard for 1970s rape revenge movies, such as Bo Arne Vibenius’s stylish 1974 Thriller: A Cruel Picture. Hannie Caulder does have some claims to being the first representative of this genre.

Director Burt Kennedy handles the action sequences very satisfactorily. The fight scenes are not especially gory but they’re undeniably effective.

Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam and Strother Martin play the Clemens brothers, and they play them partly for laughs but they’re still vicious hoodlums and Borgnine in particular is genuinely menacing. Look out for Diana Dors in a minor supporting role.

More problematic is the casting of Robert Culp as Thomas Luther Price. He’s mostly quite good but he has some trouble convincing me he’s really the kind of guy who kills men in cold blood for money. On the other hand he does make a change from excessively macho western heroes and it is interesting to see a bounty hunter portrayed so sympathetically. He’s really a guy with strong moral principles, and killing bad guys is after all performing a community service. He comes across as being more like a freelance cop than a mere killer.

Of course a movie like this ultimately will stand or fall on the performance of the lead actress. She has to be able to convince us she really could take on hardened bad guys in a gunfight and win and at the same time she has to retain our sympathies. Raquel Welch is more than equal to the challenge. Apart from the superb Kansas City Bomber this is perhaps her finest straight dramatic role.

What makes it interesting is that she has difficulty in becoming a perfect killing machine. She becomes an expert gunfighter certainly but she really doesn’t like killing. She kills because she feels compelled to do so but she has to force herself to overcome her squeamishness. She retains a certain vulnerability but she has the strength of character to carry out her task anyway.This makes her a more convincing heroine than the protagonists in most similar movies. At the risk of sounding incredibly old-fashioned she remains a woman, and when she kills she has to convince herself that it’s absolutely necessary.

This movie’s sexual politics are more complex than you find in the average rape-revenge movie. There’s no simplistic assumption that all men are violent thugs. This type of movie can all too easily descend into a depressing and hopeless nihilism, leaving the viewer feeling that the world is a cesspool and there is little than can be done to change it. Hannie Caulder avoids this pitfall. We’re left not only with some hope for the world, but with some hope for Hannie as well. She has not lost all faith in human beings and she has not lost her own humanity.

While rape revenge movies are often justified as being empowering for women they rarely feel that way. This one actually does.

Umbrella’s Region 4 release is in the correct Cinemascope aspect ratio and looks extremely good.

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

2011-10-22T11:29:00.006+11:00

Beneath the Planet of the Apes was the first of the sequels to the 1968 science fiction hit The Planet of the Apes. And it’s the kind of movie that reminds me why I usually avoid sequels.

At the end of the 60s 20th Century-Fox was in major trouble. They’d lost a bundle on a series of box-office turkeys. The surprise success of The Planet of the Apes was one of the few pieces of good news for the studio in that period. In fact things were so grim they decided on what was at that time a fairly unusual step - a sequel to The Planet of the Apes.

Right from the start the signs were not good. The director of the original film, Franklin J. Schaffner, was unavailable to do the sequel. Roddy McDowell was unavailable. Various script ideas were floated that nobody was very happy with. Finally a screenplay was cobbled together. Charlton Heston had been very enthusiastic about the first film and was very pleased with the results but he was uninterested in the idea of appearing in a second film. When he read the script his disinterest changed to an absolute determination to have nothing to do with the picture. Finally he was prevailed upon to play a supporting role as a personal favour to Fox’s studio chief.

Heston’s misgivings proved to be well-founded. The film is a mess. Worse than that, it’s a clumsy and annoying mess. It has all the faults of the first movie, only more so. And it has none of the first movie’s virtues.

With Heston unwilling to take the starring role Fox recruited James Franciscus. He’s an astronaut named Brent, part of a rescue mission despatched to find Taylor (Heston) and his crew. Brent’s spaceship goes through the same time slippage as the first mission and crash-lands, with Brent being the only survivor.

He soon manages to get himself captured by the apes, escapes, and discovers a strange colony of mutant telepathic humans living beneath the planet. They worship an atom bomb. This is the cue for some predictably heavy-handed observations on religion and on the wickedness of nuclear weapons. The first movie was just as heavy-handed in this area but it at least had the virtue of the shock ending and the genuinely original premise. This second movie delivers the same message but at greater length and without any of the impact the first one had.

The plot becomes ever sillier. There’s an attempt at another shock ending but by the time it arrived I was struggling to keep awake and I was just grateful the movie was over. In fact there were several attempts to reproduce the famous shock effect of the original but they don’t really work.

As the hero James Franciscus is a very poor substitute for Chuck Heston. His mistake is to make Brent too much like a Taylor clone which is to invite comparisons which are bound to be unfavourable. No-one does Charlton Heston as well as Heston does. Franciscus would have done better to have tried to give Brent more of a personality of his own.

The makeup effects and sets are pretty much the same as in the first movie, apart from the underground set which is reasonably impressive.

Given that three more sequels followed one assumes that Beneath the Planet of the Apes must have done pretty well at the box office but it’s a major disappointment nonetheless.

The UK Blu-Ray release looks nice enough and has plenty of extras.

Note: the screencaps are from the DVD release, not the Blu-Ray.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

2011-10-20T00:40:00.007+11:00

The Andromeda Strain is a movie I’ve seen several times before. This was one of the more important early 1970s Hollywood science fiction time but has it stood the test of time? The answer to that is that in some ways it has, in others it hasn’t.

This adaptation of a Michael Crichton thriller was an ambitious undertaking for director Robert Wise. It was a project he was keen to take on. Wise attempted just about every possible film genre during his long career and his science fiction movies are always interesting at the very least. I’m personally not a fan of The Day the Earth Stood Still but it was undeniably a very influential movie in the genre, and in a rather different way The Andromeda Strain was as well.

The movie starts with an attempt to retrieve a US satellite that has landed near the small town of Piedmont in New Mexico. The retrieval team makes a surprising and grim discovery. Every single human being in the town is dead, and within a few minutes the members of the retrieval team are dead as well. That’s when the alarm bells start to ring, and Project Wildfire is activated. This is a very secret project for dealing with the possibility of contamination crisis caused by organisms brought back to Earth from space. And it’s fairly clear that the satellite, launched as part of the very secret Project Scoop, has brought back just such an organism.

But how can any organism kill so quickly? Most of the townspeople appear to have been struck with extraordinary suddenness. On the other hand it’s clear that a tiny handful survived for quite a while, and two of the town’s 68 inhabitants are in fact still alive.

Dr Jeremy Stone and his team of hand-picked scientists now have to isolate the organism involved, find out how it works, and most importantly of all they have to find a way to stop it or (preferably) destroy it. They are authorised to take rather drastic measures. Dr Stone can request the President to order a nuclear strike on the site of any suspected contamination site and that seem likely to now be the imminent fate of Piedmont, New Mexico. Or perhaps not, as events take some unexpected turns.

Dr Stone’s scientific team will be subjected to extreme stresses and it has to be said that they don’t handle them especially well. They will also make some unsettling discoveries about the real nature of both Project Scoop and Project Wildfire.

As far as visual achievements and special effects are concerned the movie is a triumph. The special effects were about as cutting edge as you could get in 1971. There were no computer graphics effects as such in 1971, but there were scenes that were achieved by the use of computer-controlled photography so you could argue that this movie really did point the way forward in that area. These advanced techniques were combined seamlessly with more traditional techniques such as the use of matte paintings. The movie pulls off some stunning visual tour-de-forces that still look as impressive as they did in the early 70s.

Wise, always a skillful craftsman, handles the suspense elements with consummate skill. This is a very tense and exciting film.

Wise deliberately chose actors who were not major stars, and he gets generally excellent performances from them. Arthur Hill is particularly good as Dr Stone.

The real star is arguably the ultra high tech Wildfire laboratory, supposedly in a remote part of Nevada, and looking more like the interior of a starship than a scientific laboratory.

The movie requires an immense amount of exposition. The audience needs to be told (or at least that was the assumption on which Wise and his production team were working) on the inner workings of the facility and on Project Wildfire. The movie is generally pretty successful in getting all this exposition across without the results seeming inordinately clumsy. And the technobabble and the gadgets are great fun.

Where the movie works less well is where it tries to include a political message. The conspiracy theory paranoia and the preachiness work strongly against it (and preachiness had been an equally serious flaw in Wise’s much earlier The Day the Earth Stood Still). It’s all very predictable and rather tiresome. One can imagine Fox Mulder loving this movie as a kid.

If you can put up with these moments of very heavy handed propaganda The Andromeda Strain is a gripping science thriller and in any case it’s worth seeing just for the impressive and very cool visuals (which haven’t dated at all). So it’s still pretty much essential viewing for any self-respecting fan of cinematic science fiction.

Lust for a Vampire (1971)

2011-10-18T11:44:00.008+11:00

Ah, Lust for a Vampire. With the possible exception of Dracula AD 1972 this must surely be the most reviled of all Hammer’s movies. Is it as bad as its reputation would suggest? Is it as bad as my memories of it from several years ago? The answer on both counts is, yes and no.

It’s certainly not one of Hammer’s shining moments. It’s one of their most overtly trashy offerings but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in my book. I like cinematic trash.

This movie forms part of their Karnstein trilogy, along with The Vampire Lovers and Twins of Evil, based very loosely (very very loosely indeed) on Sheridan le Fanu’s classic 1860 vampire novel Carmilla. The Vampire Lovers stuck closest to the source material and it’s by far the best of the three. It’s also the only one of the three in which the lesbian vampire angle (which is very much part of le Fanu’s novel) actually serves some purpose other than titillation.

Titillation though was very high on the agenda in all three Karnstein films. They went as far as Hammer was ever prepared to go in terms of sex and nudity.

The plot of Lust for a Vampire is pure exploitation cinema. It is 1830, somewhere in Hammer’s semi-mythical central Europe, and gothic novelist Richard Lestrange (Michael Johnson) talks himself into a job as English teacher as Miss Simpson’s finishing school for girls. He had never considered teaching as a desirable profession until he came across a party of scantily-clad young ladies from the school practising their dance routines in the open air. Whereupon he was suddenly seized by the desire to impart learning to the young.

He shares accommodation at the school with history teacher Giles Barton (Ralph Bates). Barton has an obsessive interest in the history of the Karnstein family, the local grandees. We will later discover that his interest in the family is motivated by the legends that they were vampires. Giles believes the legends, and Giles has always wanted to be a vampire. Giles has other obsessions, notably one of the students at the school, the extraordinarily beautiful Mircalla (Yutte Stensgaard).

All is not well at Miss Simpson’s school however. Several girls from the village have gone missing and now one of the students, Susan Pelley, has disappeared. Miss Simpson dreads scandal so she is reluctant to report the matter to the police. She finds an unexpected ally in the person of the Countess Herritzen (Barbara Jefford), Mircalla’s mother (or possibly her guardian, I confess I wasn’t entirely clear on that point). As luck would have it the countess always travels with her personal physician which comes in very handy when Giles Barton is found dead. He is able to issue death certificates for both Giles Barton and Susan and is prepared to overlook small details such as the bite marks on Barton’s neck and in Susan’s case the lack of a body. The important thing is that this will allow Miss Simpson to avoid any unpleasantness with the authorities.

Of course Miss Simpson’s attempts to avoid scandal backfire when one of the teaches insists on being difficult. Meanwhile Richard Lestrange is also becoming obsessed with Mircalla. It all leads up to that most clichéd of horror movie endings as a mob of enraged villagers with flaming torches descends upon Karnstein Castle.

Ralph Bates is irritating as Barton. Michael Johnson as Lestrange is not an overly exciting hero. Mike Raven is dull in the totally unnecessary role of the master vampire of the Karnstein clan.

Mircalla was to have been played by Ingrid Pitt but she (perhaps wisely) backed out. Yutte Stensgaard is quite adequate as an actress but the movie but the movie really needed the more charismatic Ingrid Pitt to give it some badly needed focus.

The movie was in fact plagued by drop outs. Peter Cushing backed out (and again his presence would have added some focus) while Terence Fisher was probably quite relieved to be saved from the director’s job by a timely broken leg. Jimmy Sangster stepped in and while his achievements as a genre movie screenwriter were considerable he was the first to admit that he was not a great success as a director.

It could be argued that this fairly aimless movie might have been improved by the inclusion of a good deal more sex and nudity. It’s sleazy but not sleazy enough to compensate for a threadbare plot and an overall lack of any real sense of what the movie was attempting to achieve.

And of course there’s the song, Strange Love, surely one of the most forgettable ditties ever to find its way into a movie.

On the other hand, with all its faults, Lust for a Vampire still manages to be campy fun. If you can accept it on that level it’s quite enjoyable.

Maroc 7 (1967)

2011-10-15T17:19:00.010+11:00

I just love 1960s spy movie but despite the claims on the original movie poster Maroc 7 isn’t a spy movie. It is however a 1960s crime caper movie, and I love them almost as much.

The movie opens with Simon Grant (Gene Barry) stealing some very valuable jewels from the safe belonging to Louise Henderson (Cyd Charisse). It turns out that she had stolen them from somebody else, and Grant’s object isn’t the theft. He wants to become her partner. Louise is a model who runs a photographic studio that acts as a front for her real business, the theft of jewels and art treasures.

She doesn’t have much alternative, and Grant seems like he could be pretty useful anyway, so he joins Louise and her little band on a jaunt to Morocco. They’ll be doing a fashion shoot, and of course some thieving. Louise’s employees include a creepy photographer with a scandalous past (played by Leslie Phillips) and a bevy of beautiful models.

Simon Grant has a bit of an eye for the ladies and he’s especially attracted to one of the models, Claudia (Elsa Martinelli). The gang has not managed to avoid the notice of the authorities and the indefatigable Inspector Barrada is hot on their trail.

There are plenty of double-crosses in store, as you would expect.

The plot is a bit creaky, but this kind of movie doesn’t really require dazzlingly original plotting. The qualities that are required are a sense of style, some tongue-in-cheek humour, a lively pace and glamour. And Maroc 7 has all of those qualities.

It also boasts some eccentric but interesting casting. Leslie Phillips (who co-produced the film) is best-known for countess appearance in British comedies but this time around he’s a heavy, albeit a sleazy and slightly cowardly heavy. With his fruity voice and pompous manner he makes an unusual but effective villain. Cyd Charisse as a diabolical criminal mastermind is a even more surprising casting choice. She doesn’t seem entirely comfortable but she gives it her best shot and she’s a lot better than you might expect.

Elsa Martinelli just has to look glamorous, which she does quite successfully. The other female cast members who play Louise’s models are also suitably glamorous and there’s some amusing bitchiness. Gene Barry was better known for his television work in series like Burke’s Law. He always brought and effortless charm to his performances ad this is no exception, and the role is perfectly suited to his talents.

Gerry O’Hara does a more than competent job as director and keeps things moving along at a good pace.

These kinds of movies are pure lightweight entertainment and should never take themselves seriously, or be taken seriously by the viewer. This isn’t Citizen Kane. It offers some nice location shooting. There’s a good mix of romance, humour and action. There’s glamour in abundance. It’s stylish escapist fun.

I caught this one on TV, in a sadly sub-standard print. It’s been released on DVD and copies are around although you may have to do some searching. If you’re a fan of the 60s caper movie genre it’s worth adding to your collection.

The Beast Must Die (1974)

2011-10-13T13:05:00.004+11:00

The horror movies made by Amicus in the 60s and 70s have never impressed me all that much and their 1974 offering The Beast Must Die does little to change that judgment although it has its entertaining moments.

This one is best described as a cross between The Most Dangerous Game and Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, but with werewolves.

Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) is an eccentric millionaire big-game hunter. Eccentric is perhaps not the right word. Completely deranged would be closer. He’s hunted everything that can be hunted, and no he wants to hunt the most dangerous game of all. No, not man. Werewolves. But how do you find a werewolf to hunt? That’s simple. You just pick half a dozen people who sound like they might be werewolves, invite them to your country house for the weekend (a weekend when there’s a full moon naturally) and the odds are that one of them will turn out to be a real werewolf. You just wait for the transformation to happen.

Tom isn’t taking unnecessary chances though. He has engaged brilliant Polish engineer Pavel (Anton Diffring) to instal an ultra-sophisticated security system. He has cameras and super-sensitive microphones everywhere. He tests the system by getting Pavel and four commando-type guys to use it to hunt him. This is by far the best part of the movie and it’s unfortunate that it comes right at the start.

The problem with werewolf movies is making the transformation scenes convincing. This movies doesn’t even bother with transformation scenes. It just cuts from the actor to a dog made to look like a wolf. This turns out to be even lamer than the lamest transformation scene and the dog basically looks like a dog. Not even a very scary dog. At one point it has a fight with the family Labrador and the Labrador looks fiercer than the supposed wolf.

This highlights a really big fault with this film. It isn’t very scary. Tom has an assault rifle loaded with silver bullets and a helicopter at his disposal so really the odds are stacked too much against the werewolf. The movie then has to fall back on that old standby of having people do stupid things in order to put themselves in danger.

The cast is interesting. Calvin Lockhart had done several blaxploitation movies and in his shiny black outfit he looks more like a big-time coke dealer than a big-game hunter. He gives the role everything he’s got, and at times overdoes it a bit, but he’s generally entertaining.

Peter Cushing would seem to have been a natural for a role as a werewolf expert (and possible werewolf) in a movie like this but he affects an incredibly irritating and unconvincing Swedish accent that makes him seem ridiculous rather than sinister. Charles Gray and Michael Gambon are effective as other possible werewolves.

Director Paul Annett spent most of his career in TV and that’s not surprising. His direction is less than inspired. The pacing is excellent but the inherently silly plot falls apart badly and the ending is disappointingly unexciting.

There was an art to making low-budget horror movies without making them look cheap but this movie all too often just looks cheap. There’s also a rather silly gimmick where the film is stopped about fifteen minutes before the end and the audience is invited to guess the identity of the werewolf.

Optimum’s Region 2 DVD is fullframe and includes no extras and cannot be recommended at all. There are apparently better DVD releases but unless you can pick up a copy very cheaply I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. There’s a very simple reason Amicus were overshadowed by Hammer - Hammer’s movies were a lot better than Amicus’s.

Metropolis (1927)

2011-10-11T00:15:00.007+11:00

Almost any excuse will do for yet another “definitive” reconstruction of Fritz Lang’s strange and notorious 1927 masterpiece Metropolis but this time there is a real justification for such an attempt - the unexpected discovery in Argentina of a nearly compete print that includes almost half an hour of footage previously thought to be lost forever.

The basic plot is probably familiar to most film fans. The futuristic city of Metropolis is a city of machines, and it is also two cities. The upper city is a playground for the rich. The lower city, deep beneath the earth, houses the workers who tend the machines. The city was the creation of the single-minded will of Joh Fredersen, although it took the genius of the inventor Rotwang to make it a reality. Joh Fredersen’s son Freder has fallen in love with a kind of prophetess/populist leader from the lower city, a woman named Maria, and at the same time he has discovered the true conditions under which the workers labour. She preaches non-violent resistance.

Rotwang has created a robot and has given it the form of Maria. This sham Maria incites the workers to destroy the city.

This was the most expensive of all German silent movies, costing Ufa Studios an estimated 5 million Reichsmarks. It took just 75,000 Reichsmarks at the box office. This catastrophic commercial failure proved ruinous for Ufa but the movie’s legend has subsequently grown steadily year by year.

The screenplay was co-written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, one of the most controversial figures in the German film industry of that era.

Ufa had hoped this movie would give them a major foothold in the US market but Paramount, who distributed the movie there, were horrified by its inordinate length and cut the movie by about half an hour. Ufa, responding to the film’s poor performance box office, subsequently released the edited version and destroyed the additional footage. The original version survived only in an unbelievably poor quality 16mm copy languishing in a Buenos Aires film museum.

Much of the newly discovered missing footage is inconsequential, representing merely the trimming of scenes that were in truth overlong. It does restore a subplot that had ben almost entirely eliminated, a subplot involving the search for the hero Freder by the character variously described as The Thin Man and Slim. In all honesty this subplot is not vital to the film. There is however one absolutely crucial element that the missing footage restores to the movie, the material relating to Hel, the mother of Joh Fredersen.

Hel had been Rotwang’s wife. Joh Fredesen had stolen her from him, only to see her die giving birth to his son Freder. The character of Hel provides Rotwang’s motivation for creating his robot - he wants revenge on Joh Fredersen and he wants to recreate Hel.

Metropolis is a movie that had been persistently misunderstood. It was attacked by both the nazis and the communists at the time of its original release. On the commentary track by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum accompanying the Blu-Ray release by Eureka he says that he originally saw the movie in Marxist terms but now believes it’s best understood in Freudian terms. I suspect he’s wrong on both counts. While modern film critics are happy, indeed overjoyed, to interpret any movie in either Marxist or Freudian terms, they’re much less happy when they encounter a movie which demands to be interpreted in religious terms. That’s not an acceptable method of analysis in the world of the film school.

But you only have to watch Metropolis to realise that it’s overloaded with religious symbolism. Maria is both the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. And Rosenbaum to his credit recognises this, but he seems reluctant to push the religious interpretation to its obvious conclusion. Freder is clearly a Christ-figure, Joh Fredesen is God the Father and Rotwang is Lucifer. What makes the film so interesting is that there is layer upon layer of religious symbolism. Hel can be seen as Eve, and as a Virgin Mary figure. Lang was raised as a Catholic and continued to identify himself as a a Catholic throughout his life.

While Thea von Harbou’s novel (written concurrently with the screenplay) stresses the religious themes even more strongly than the movie it is likely that the themes of the movie derive equally from Lang and von Harbou. Luis Buñuel in the 60s began the practice by which critics have tended to attribute everything they approve of in the movie to Lang and everything they disapprove of to von Harbou (and they apply this to all the collaborations between Lang and von Harbou). It’s a practice that Lang himself deplored.

The original intention was apparently also to stress the conflict between the technological and the magical, with Rotwang being more explicitly a magician (as in von Harbou’s novel) . Lang admits that he lacked the nerve at the time to fully develop the mystical and magical themes, something he later came to regret.

Of course the lasting popularity of Metropolis can be attributed not just to its visual brilliance (which is undeniable) but to the fact that it lends itself to multiple interpretations. I have little patience with Freudian interpretations but if you’re a devotee of such mumbo-jumbo you can certainly interpret Metropolis that way. Metropolis is in fact a movie that is so overloaded with ambiguous symbolism that you can simply add your own meaning to it. If you’re a Marxist it can be a Marxist film; if you’re a political reactionary then it’s an ultra-conservative and elitist film; if you’re a follower of Ayn Rand it can be a proto-Randian film; if you’re a Freudian it abounds in mother symbolism.

However you want to interpret it the one inescapable fact is that in purely visual terms it’s a staggeringly brilliant achievement.

The Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray release includes a commentary track and an excellent German TV documentary of the reconstruction of the movie, plus an illustrated booklet with various articles on the movie. The previously missing footage is of atrocious quality (it was so badly damaged that a proper restoration was simply not possible) but the rest of the movie looks absolutely superb. It’s also been released on Blu-Ray by Kino in the US but the Eureka edition seems to be generally regarded as the better of the two releases.

Note: the screencaps are not from the Blu-Ray.

Sandok (1965)

2011-10-08T19:41:00.007+11:00

Sandok (La montagna di luce) is a fairly entertaining 1965 adventure flick directed by journeyman Italian genre director Umberto Lenzi.

The first thing that needs to be cleared up is the matter of the title. Lenzi made a series of movies based loosely on the Sandokan books of popular 19th century Italian author Emilio Salgari, one of the masters of swashbuckling adventure fiction. This particular film was the fourth and last and being an Italian genre movie was released under many different titles. Mya DVD have chosen to release it on DVD as Sandok which is a slightly confusing choice. It might have been less confusing to have released it under one of its alternative titles such as Temple of a Thousand Lights or to have simply given a literal translation of the Italian title, Mountain of Light. Especially given that there’s no character called Sandok in the film.

Alan Foster (played by American actor Richard Harrison) is an American bank robber on the run who is hiding out in India. The time period is never specified but one assumes it’s the early 20th century. His attempt to do a little card-sharping at the expense of the local Maharajah (played by Daniele Vargas) backfires rather badly. The Maharajah is trying to manipulate him into stealing the fabulous diamond known as the Mountain of Light. The diamond resides on the forehead of a gigantic statue of one of the Hindu gods.

Alan acquires an unlikely accomplice in the person of a remarkably dishonest fakir named Sitama (Wilbert Bradley). He’s so dishonest that he and Alan make a perfect team. The theft seem impossible. The temple is heavily guarded. But Alan has a plan.

There are some reasonably clever plot twists as the various parties involved try to double-cross each other, with Alan taking time off to fall in love with a beautiful dancer named Lilamani (Luciana Gilli).

In some ways it could be seen as a heist movie in an Indian setting. It was actually filmed in Malaysia but there’s some reasonably decent location photography. There’s also not a single Indian actor - the entire cast is either American or Italian.

Lenzi wasn’t a very exciting director but the action sequences are adequate. The big problem is that at 87 minutes the movie is just a touch too short. The ending seems very rushed, almost as if there’s something missing, but this does seem to be an uncut print so it appears to be the fault of the film-makers rather than the work of distributors. On the plus side the pacing is brisk and it doesn’t waste any time getting us into the action.

The acting is quite good by Italian genre movie standards. Richard Harrison is a reasonably engaging rogueish hero. For the robbery he disguises himself as an Indian - it’s probably the most feeble and unconvincing disguise in movie history but in this type of movie it doesn’t really matter. Wilbert Bradley has a lot of fun with the role of Sitama.

Mya DVD have copped a lot of flak for the quality of some of their releases. There’s no real cause for complaint this time. The movie is presented in the correct 2.35:1 aspect ratio and it’s a fairly good print. As is customary with Mya’s releases there are no extras.

This is lightweight fun that should appeal to fans of adventure movies in exotic settings.

Fangs of the Living Dead (1969)

2011-10-06T20:40:00.007+11:00

Fangs of the Living Dead (AKA Malenka) was an early directorial effort from Amando de Ossorio. He went on to make some reasonably entertaining horror flicks so it’s not altogether fair to judge him on the basis of this particular film.

A woman who is about to be married receives a letter, informing her that she has just inherited a title, and a gloomy gothic castle. Arriving at the castle she meets the young count, and spots a portrait of her grandmother Malenka, to whom she bears an uncanny resemblance, on the wall. At the nearby inn she encounters a barmaid suffering from a mysterious wasting illness, an illness that appears to be a form of anaemia. You can pretty much fill in the blanks from there.

It’s difficult to judge this movie based on the DVD from Dollar DVD. Yes, I know, the company name doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence, does it? The transfer is terrible, it’s fullscreen, and the English dubbing is bad beyond belief.

Even the packaging is spectacularly cheap and nasty - a flimsy cardboard sleeve is all you get.

I’m inclined to think that the whole thing was intended as a parody, but that may simply be the effect of the outrageous English dubbing. And the music! The music has to be heard to be believed.

Anita Ekberg plays a dual role as the new countess and as her grandmother Malenka. She seems stunned for most of the movie, which is understandable. The acting is extraordinarily hammy, although again it has to be said that the dubbing doesn’t do the actors any favours. There’s no suspense, and there are no thrills or chills. There is an attempt at a twist ending.

If you like your horror with very large helpings of extra cheese then there’s some bad movie enjoyment to be had out of this one. The voice actress doing Anita Ekberg’s part redefines one’s understanding of the term hammy.

Had it been possible to see this movie in a sub-titled version it may have been a completely different experience, so it’s possible I’m being much too hard on it.

This film was an unforgettable experience, although definitely not in a good way. But since the DVD cost me a dollar I can’t really complain.

Hip, Hot and 21 (1967)

2011-10-04T00:51:00.006+11:00

Hip, Hot and 21 is sexploitation Texas style, but there aren’t any ten-gallon hats in evidence. There’s also a decided lack of plot coherence but that pretty much goes with the territory in the crazy world of 1960s American sexploitation.

This one was made by Dale Berry in 1967, and his cinematic style could best be described as deranged incompetence. Of course if he’d been a French director of art-house movies with a Marxist slant this level of filmic incoherence would have had him hailed as an avant-garde genius (this movie in fact makes marginally more sense than, say, Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her ). Sadly though Dale Berry was just a skin-flick director so he missed out on being lionised by the film school crowd.

Hip, Hot and 21 starts out as hicksploitation, with Diane Darcel being forced in to marriage by her toothless alcoholic hillbilly daddy. We’ll find out later that her new husband paid her daddy $50 for her. Now she’s off to the big bad city to start married life, but married life ends for her on her wedding night. Her husband walks out on her.

Luckily she has someone to turn to, a friend of her new husband’s who lives upstairs. Although perhaps a lesbian junkie with criminal connections isn’t the ideal person to turn to for good advice. Pretty soon the movie has moved into the sleazy underworld of bars, hookers and drug deals. What connection her husband had with these people is never made clear, but then very few things in this movie are clear.

There’s a German dope lord named Al who runs a bar. There are assorted lesbian junkies. And there’s Ernie. Ernie is one sick puppy, with a taste for S&M and a tendency to cry a lot. OK, we all have our quirks, but Ernie has a tendency to let his S&M fantasies get out of hand. Badly out of hand. Then somehow our heroine hooks up with another lesbian junkie dope pusher but I have no idea where she came from. She’s just suddenly there.

What little plot there is stops at regular intervals for gratuitous go-go dancing. Mind you, gratuitous go-go dancing is one thing I will never complain about in a movie. Go-go dancing is like a guy in a gorilla suit - it invariably improves any movie. As an added bonus one of the gratuitous go-go dancers is none other than Lorna Maitland, star of several early Russ Meyer movies from his redneck gothic phase. One might also consider it as an added bonus that one of these dance sequences is a topless gratuitous go-go dancing sequence, something which adds a touch of class to any film.

If you think I’m focusing too much on the go-go dancing that’s because it’s really the only justification for this movie’s existence.

After these interruptions we get a bit more of what almost qualifies as plot development. The police are after Al, he’s after some money of his that has gone missing, and finally we get a chase sequence that ends the movie.

The acting is about on a par with the scriptwriting, although I have to admit that Diane Darcel gives it everything she’s got. She has no acting ability but she sure has enthusiasm.

There’s not a huge amount of nudity. The sexual violence almost qualifies it as a roughie although it’s not comparable to excesses you get in, let’s say, a Michael Findlay roughie.

Something Weird (and I’m sure by now it’s not going to come as an earth-shaking revelation that this is a Something Weird DVD release) usually manage to find remarkably good prints of obscure sexploitation flicks but this one is a bit on the rough side. Not that it detracts anything from the movie - the cinematography on this movie is pretty much limited to having the camera pointed in approximately the right direction and (mostly) in focus.

Not exactly a classic from the vaults, definitely not one of Something Weird’s better offerings, but one can forgive a movie for many faults if it includes no less than three go-go dancing sequences.

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971)

2011-10-01T16:09:00.007+10:00

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb has always been one of my favourite Hammer films and watching it for the third time I find myself liking it as much as ever.

This is in fact the best of Hammer’s mummy films, and with the exception of the original 1932 Universal classic it’s arguably the best mummy film ever made.

It’s based on Bram Stoker’s best and most interesting novel, The Jewel of Seven Stars (yes I really do think it's better than Dracula). Christopher Wicking produced a fine screenplay and Seth Holt directs with considerable flair. Sadly Holt died before the movie was completed and Michael Carreras had to finish the shoot.

A couple of decades before the film opens Professor Julian Fuchs (Andrew Keir) had led a team of British archaeologists on an expedition to find the tomb of a mysterious unnamed Egyptian queen. His interest is more than just archaeological - he has found references to this queen in ancient and medieval manuscripts and he had become convinced that she had discovered the secrets of life and death.

The tomb is found, along with the perfectly preserved body of Queen Tera (for that turns out to be her name). Tera had made bitter enemies of the priesthood of her day. After her death they attempted to destroy all references to her, to expunge all record of her existence. And they feared her so much they cut off her hand, believing that with her body incomplete she could never return to life. Without that precaution they considered this eventuality to be a real possibility.

And the priests had been right to fear that Tera could conquer death, but their precautions were in vain.

At the exact moment that Fuchs opened Tera’s tomb his wife back in England died in childbirth. The child was apparently born dead, but then started to breathe and survived. This child, his only daughter Margaret (Valerie Leon), is now a beautiful young woman. Her birthday is approaching, an event that is infinitely more significant than one might suppose.

All this is revealed in flashbacks occurring during Margaret’s troubled dreams. Margaret dreams of other things as well. She dreams of Queen Tera’s life and death.

Margaret has never been allowed into the basement of the Fuchs home. When she and her boyfriend Tod Browning (yes, Tod Browning) finally do gain access to the basement they make two alarming discoveries. The first is the apparently lifeless body of Professor Fuchs. The second is the perfectly preserved body of Queen Tera, and she is (as the audience already knows) the exact double of Margaret.

The Professor is not dead but in an extreme coma. He has left instructions for his old friend Doctor Putnum, indicating that he expected this to happen.

The very smooth and very sinister Corbeck (James Villiers), who had been a member of the Fuchs expedition, now appears on the scene. Corbeck clearly has his own agenda and it’s likely to be a selfish one but Margaret has nowhere else to turn for help - Corbeck at least knows what is going on. The other members of the expedition are dying one by one in unexplained circumstances. Queen Tera may be dead, but she’s been busy. Margaret’s destiny is indissolubly linked to hers, but the link may well prove to be a fatal one.

There’s moderate gory and very brief nudity in this movie but really it’s a very old-fashioned horror movie. Old-fashioned in the best possible way - a horror movie that relies on the building up of an atmosphere of dread and does it in a quite subtle way. Queen Tera is terrifying not because she’s violent but because she threatens to undermine the very order of nature, because she had gained access to powers in her lifetime that no mortal should possess, and these powers did not die with her. And since these powers gave her control over life and death can Tera be said to have ever truly been dead?

This kind of horror has always seemed to me to be far more effective that knife-wielding maniacs. It’s the kind of horror that suggests that there really are fates worse than death.

Tera is also a slightly ambiguous monster. We’re not quite sure what her ultimate agenda might have been, nor can we be certain exactly what her intentions are if she succeeds in reuniting her soul and her body. Perhaps she is somewhat akin to Hammer’s other great monster, Baron Frankenstein - not precisely evil but horribly dangerous because she recognises no limits to her ambitions and regards any means as justified in order to achieve her ends.

There are no major stars in the cast, but there are some very fine actors delivering very effective performances. Andrew Keir as Professor Fuchs is a strangely ineffectual figure, a man who was once himself prepared to dare anything but who was badly frightened by what took place twenty years ago and who has lost his nerve. James Villiers is delightfully malevolent, a smiling but deadly cobra. Valerie Leon is a perfectly adequate heroine. Aubrey Morris is wonderfully creepy as always as Dr Putnum.

Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb has style, atmosphere and a genuine sense of horrifying forces being unleashed and it all adds up to a superb horror movie.

The Great Silence (1968)

2011-09-29T02:23:00.002+10:00

While it’s not Sergio Corbucci’s best-known spaghetti western (that honour goes to Django) there are many who believe that his 1968 movie The Great Silence (Il grande silenzio) is his greatest. Unfortunately those people are wrong.

The movie concerns bounty hunters at the close of the 19th century. A large group of criminals is holed up in mountainous snowbound terrain waiting for a government amnesty. Before the amnesty arrives though they have to survive the attentions of a gang of bounty hunters. The most notorious of these is a man known variously as Loco or Tigrero (the subtitles on the Region 4 DVD insist that he’s called Tigrero). Either way he’s played by Klaus Kinski. He’s the movie’s chief bad guy (although his occupation happens to be hunting down criminals).

The bandits have a champion however, a mysterious stranger known as Silenzio or Silence. We later find out that his nickname comes from the fact that he’s mute as the result of having his vocal cords destroyed by wicked bounty hunters when he was a child. The bounty hunters had killed his father. Silenzio is now a crusader for the rights of criminals sought by bounty hunters. He pursues his crusade by taunting them into drawing first and then shooting them with his nifty machine pistol. He’s the hero of the movie (although his occupation happens to be defending criminals).

When a black woman’s husband, a thief, is shot by Tigrero she employs Silenzio to avenge him. She and Silenzio fall in love.

While this is happening a new idealistic sheriff has arrived in the town of Snow Hill. He doesn’t like bounty hunters and he wants to see Tigrero behind bars. The fact that Tigrero is actually pursuing a perfectly legal if rather unpleasant occupation doesn’t trouble the sheriff too much. He’s sympathetic to the rights of the poor and downtrodden, and he clearly considers that criminals fall within that category.

There’s also a wicked capitalist oppressor, Pollicut, who is in league with the bounty hunters.

With both Silenzio and the sheriff against him you might think that Tigrero would be in trouble, but in fact he’s a whole lot smarter than either of his antagonists.

The Great Silence has strong claims to being the most miserable spaghetti western ever made. Its famously downbeat ending is part of the film’s problem, but not for the reason you might suppose. The fact that it’s downbeat isn’t the problem but the fact that it lacks any dramatic punch certainly is. The whole plot just doesn’t quite develop the necessary dramatic tension. Silenzio is just too inept, too helpless. You really have to buy the naïve political message if you’re going to enjoy this movie.

Jean-Lois Trintignant plays Silenzio. His performance is presumably intended to be moody and intense. It doesn’t quite come off. As a deadly killer he is less than entirely convincing.

The movie’s saving grace is Klaus Kinski. He’s magnificent. He’s gloriously wicked, a man who really loves his job, especially the part that involves shooting people.

Technically the movie is an odd mix of brilliance and incompetence. There’s some stunning location photography, and the mountains and the remorseless snow create a superb atmosphere. But then there are scenes where Corbucci couldn’t even be bothered to make sure the camera is in focus.

This is a movie that the film school crowd will adore. It has the kind of heavy-handed political message that they love so much. And it has those moments of technical incompetence that will have them talking excitedly about cinéma vérité.

A film worth seeing for Kinski’s terrific performance, and for some impressive visuals.

The Region 4 DVD from Force Video is in Italian with English sub-titles.

Riders of the Whistling Skull (1937)

2011-09-27T17:54:00.005+10:00

The DVD cover art might suggest that Riders of the Whistling Skull is going to be just another 1930s B-western, but in fact it’s an odd and quite interesting little hybrid film and worthy of note for cult movie fans.

Sure it has cowboys, and Indians. But it also has a hint of the supernatural, a lost city, an ancient Indian curse, an evil cult, a murder mystery, mummies, a whistling skull, a cliff face in the form of a gigantic skull, a ventriloquist and archaeologists. And it gets bonus points for having the archaeologists wearing pith helmets.

The Three Mesquiteers (Tucson Smith, Lullaby Joslin and Stony Brooke) were apparently the heroes of a large number of B-westerns made by Republic in the 30s. They’re ranchers but they’re always up for adventure and doing good deeds. So when pretty young female archaeologist Betty Marsh turns up and announces that her archaeologist father Professor Marsh has failed to return from his latest expedition they tag along with the rescue expedition.

Professor Marsh had been searching for the fabled lost city of Lukachuke. There’s a treasure connected with the lost city, which leads to the suspicion that there may have been foul play. His colleague Professor Flaxon turns up but is mysteriously murdered after someone douses the lights. One of the Three Mesquiteers happens to be an avid reader of detective pulp magazines and he is convinced that the murderer was a member of the expedition.

From this point on it’s non-stop action as the expedition has to fend off attacks from a secret Indian cult and find the lost city whilst trying to discover the identity of the murderer among them. There’s some pretty reasonable stunt work, director Mack V. Wright does a competent job and there’s some nice location shooting.

The acting is very much B-movie stuff, which adds to the charm of the movie. Ray “Crash” Corrigan plays Tucson Smith. Corrigan was the star of countless low-budget westerns as well as serials such as the delightfully silly Undersea Kingdom. He couldn’t act but he was athletic and good-looking and could ride a horse and that was enough in those halcyon days. The Three Mesquiteers are all brave and pure of heart but without being irritating about it.

It’s all very politically incorrect of course. But it’s good-natured fun and it’s mercifully free from intrusive and annoying comic relief. The whole thing was evidently sufficiently light-hearted not to be deemed to require additional comic relief.

The plot is as goofy and as unlikely as could possibly be desired. The supernatural elements don’t add up to very much but even a suggestion of the supernatural in a western is unusual enough.

This is a movie that cheerfully ignores genre conventions, or rather it combines genre conventions from half a dozen genres and throws them all into one crazy cocktail. And a delightful cocktail it is. This movie is just pure fun.

The Alpha Video DVD release is standard Alpha Video quality. In other words it’s very rough but watchable. It’s such a strange little film that I have no hesitation in recommending it.

Westworld (1973)

2011-09-25T02:04:00.007+10:00

Michael Crichton is probably best known as the author of Jurassic Park, but his earlier vision of a theme park gone wrong was actually a lot more interesting. This was Westworld, which he wrote and directed in 1973.

The Delos Corporation has created the ultimate vacation destination, with three sophisticated theme parks - Medieval World, Roman World and Westworld. These are more than just theme parks, they’re essentially virtual reality parks but with robots instead of computer-generated images.

Each of these worlds is populated by robots that are more or less indistinguishable from real people. The guests at the resort can do anything they wish to the robots. Anything. They can shoot them. They can have sex with them. There are no rules. The technology is so advanced that it is impossible for one of the guests to injure another guest by accident, and it is impossible for the robots to harm the guests. Nothing can go wrong. Famous last words indeed.

Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin) and John Blane (James Brolin) have chosen Westworld for their holiday. They just can’t believe how enjoyable it all is. Within the first half hour Martin has already killed his first gunslinger, the sinister Black Bart (Yul Brynner). After that it’s off to the local whorehouse. This is so much fun that they even forego participating in a bank robbery in order to sample the delights of the young ladies. They might be robots, but they certainly know how to give a man a good time.

Of course you know something is going to go wrong. Behind the scenes we see lots of men in white coats, the technicians who run the resort. Although actually much of the running of the park is completely automated, controlled by powerful computers. The technology is so complex that the human technicians don’t fully understand it - many of the robots and other features of the park were designed by computers. The human technicians simply slot replacement parts into the damaged robots.

Everything goes fine at first. Of course there are occasional faults in the robots, but they’re well within the anticipated limits. At first. Then the number of faults starts to increase for no apparent reason. The chief technician notes that the occurrence of faults follows a pattern strangely reminiscent of that found in infectious diseases. It’s almost as if there’s a machine virus infecting the robots. And since they’re dealing with machines designed by other machines it’s extremely difficult to deal with such unexpected problems.

The faults had initially been fairly minor, but when a robotic rattlesnake injures a guest, and a robotic medieval wench repulses a guest’s attempted seduction, it’s clear things are getting out of hand. Inevitably the problems escalate until one of the guests gets shot by a robotic gunslinger, but by this time the technicians are losing control of their theme parks.

The movie is notable for being one of the first science fiction stories to deal with computer viruses but there’s a lot more to the movie than that. This is a story that is vastly superior to Jurassic Park because, apart from being much more witty and much more clever it’s also much more aware of the nature of the whole entertainment industry. The Delos Corporation has turned sex and violence into holiday entertainment but then that after all is exactly what movies have done. And Westworld is not a recreation of the Old west - it’s a recreation of old western movies. Just as Roman World and Medieval World recreate an imaginary past derived from movies and other media.

The Delos Corporation doesn’t just cater to male fantasies either. While Westworld with its emphasis on sex and violence is mainly popular with male guests Roman World and Medieval World cater equally for female guests and female fantasies of romance and sex with a spice of danger and exoticism. The real attraction of the resort is not that it offers limitless violence and sex - it’s the freedom from rules that is the main attraction. Sex and/or violence without guilt.

Crichton does a very creditable job as director, and manages to say everything he needs to say in just 88 minutes.

Richard Benjamin is an actor I’ve never cared for but he really is perfectly cast. I generally like James Brolin even less but he’s effective as well. In fact I like the fact that the two protagonists are not overly likeable - it adds an edge to the satire. They’re not exactly innocents. Their idea of the ideal holiday is to spend half their time shooting people and the other half cavorting in the whorehouse.

Yul Brynner manages to play a robot and still give a wonderfully effective performance.

This was a product of the pre-Star Was golden age of movie science fiction, when science fiction movies were still about ideas rather than special effects. Special effects were there to enhance the story, not to replace it. And Westworld is one of the best examples of that approach - an intelligent and very entertaining movie. Highly recommended.

The Region 2 DVD is still in print, it looks great and it’s ridiculously cheap.

Siren of Atlantis (1949)

2011-09-23T00:14:00.012+10:00

Siren of Atlantis was based on Pierre Benoît's 1919 novel L'Atlantide, which was translated into English as The Queen of Atlantis. It’s one of countless film versions of this classic adventure tale.

With Maria Montez as the star you might expect this one to put the emphasis on camp, and you’d be partly correct.

A French archaeologist has come up with a theory about the lost city of Atlantis. He believes it’s to be found in the middle of the Sahara Desert. His idea is that the Sahara was once the bed of a deep ocean.

His expedition sets off from a Foreign Legion fort and is not heard from again. Captain Jean Morhange (Dennis O'Keefe) and Lieutenant André St. Avit (Jean-Pierre Aumont) are despatched with a rescue party to find the missing scientist.

They find Atlantis. They were expecting ruins, but Atlantis is a living city. It’s a kind of hybrid civilisation, ruled over by the Atlantean queen Antinea but peopled mostly by Tuaregs. An even bigger surprise is that there are quite a few modern Europeans in the city, all survivors of various ill-fated expeditions.

Those who happen to be male and good-looking have the chance of being chosen by the queen as her current toyboy. That sounds like a good deal, given that the queen is very beautiful and apparently very passionate. She is however also capricious. She tires quickly of her paramours. Their fate thereafter is not a happy one. It’s not that she has them killed, it’s just that after enjoying the queen’s favours for a while and then finding themselves discarded they are left as mere wrecks and invariably end up as self-pitying alcoholics.

Lieutenant André St. Avit is therefore not sure how pleased he should be when he becomes the queen’s latest plaything. Any doubts are soon cast aside however - André becomes hopelessly obsessed by the beautiful but easily bored queen.

The queen’s librarian Blades (Henry Daniell) is one modern European in Antinea’s court who was never chosen to share the queen’s bed. He is as a result somewhat bitter and is of a naturally troublesome disposition, He amuses himself by setting St. Avit and Morhange against each other, as he has set many other men against each other in the past. He convinces St. Avit that Morhange has usurped his position in the queen’s favours. This will have disastrous consequences. Equally disastrous will be Morhange’s attempts to escape. This is strictly forbidden, in order to keep the existence of Altantis a secret.

There are some clever plot twists to come which I cannot speak about without giving away spoilers. It’s an interesting and multi-layered story and the film does a fairly good job with it.

The acting is actually reasonably good. Dennis O’Keefe is noble and manly as Morhange, while Jean-Pierre Aumont is suitably vulnerable to Antinea’s womanly charms. Henry Daniell makes a splendidly oily villain. Maria Montez might not hve been the worlds greatest actress but this role is well within her acting range and she acquits herself quite creditably, plus she has the exotic glamour and the dangerous sexuality that is required.

It was not a big-budget picture but it looks reasonably impressive.

There’s certainly enough here to please lovers of camp but there are also unexpected dark overtones to this movie. It seems to have been an attempt to do a fairly serious adaptation of the story and it succeeds to a greater extent than you might expect. It’s a psychological drama and a tragedy rather than a mere campfest. This is a movie that deserves more respect than it generally receives - all in all a pleasant surprise.

Odeon’s all-region PAL DVD release is light on extras but it looks extremely good and it’s pleasingly inexpensive. I recommend this one.

The Indian Scarf (1963)

2011-09-20T23:08:00.010+10:00

I’ve always been a fan of the German Edgar Wallace krimis of the 60s but now that I’ve got my hands on one of the German DVD boxed sets from Tobis I’m going to have the chance to see a few as they should be seen, in the proper ’scope aspect ratio and without the usual awful English dubbing.

First cab off the rank for me has been the 1963 Rialto production The Indian Scarf (Das indische Tuch).

The plot is one that with variations has been used hundreds of times - the members of an old family are gathered together in the family castle in Scotland to hear the reading of the will of the deceased head of the family, and the will contains the provision that no member of the family will inherit anything at all unless he or she agrees to stay in the castle for six days and six nights. Given that the members of the family all hate each other’s guts this will of course be an exquisite form of torture, and given the extent of this mutual hatred it may well end up being positively dangerous.

And of course a fierce storm arrives right on cue, the telephone lines are washed way and the roads are cut, and these temporary and unwilling inhabitants of the castle find themselves stranded. And conveniently this means that the killer (and you know there’s going to be a killer) must be one of them.

With the stage set it’s time for the mayhem to start. And there’s plenty of mayhem. A whole series of murders, all carried out in the same way - strangulation with a scarf. The body count is very impressive.

LIke I said, it’s a very familiar basic plot, but what matters in this type of movie is whether a creaky idea can be executed with enough style and enough flair to make it entertaining. Luckily the Edgar Wallace krimis usually had those qualities in abundance and this one is no exception. With Alfred Vohrer directing it’s also nicely paced.

The Wallace krimis also benefited from a pool of talented actors who did these films because there weren’t many other movies being made in West Germany at the time - if you wanted to work you were happy to accept these roles.

This one is a little different from the usual run of Wallace krimis in having an amateur detective rather than a Scotland Yard man having to solve the puzzle. In this case it’s the family solicitor, Mr Tanner. Heinz Drache does a solid job in the role, playing the only character who isn’t a raving maniac. The other cast members get to chew the scenery and they set to their task with enthusiasm. Of course you expect Klaus Kinski to be playing someone who’s completely unhinged, and you won’t be disappointed.

Eddie Arent supplies the comic relief in most of the Rialto krimis. And without the customary English dubbing he’s a lot less annoying. In fact he’s quite good.

With a plentiful supply of bizarre characters, lots of over-acting and some energetic direction it’s all a good deal of fun. And there’s a cute twist ending that may provoke groans but since these films were all approached in a tongue-in-cheek manner it’s actually quite amusing.

Watching one of these movies with the original German soundtrack with English subtitles is quite a revelation. It’s definitely a major improvement. For one thing the comic elements are less clumsy and consequently more effective.

Picture quality is extremely good. This is a DVD I can recommend wholeheartedly - the best DVD presentation I’ve seen of any of the Wallace krimis. And the movie itself is thoroughly enjoyable.

The Indian Scarf comes with both the German soundtrack with optional English subtitles and the English dubbed version. Unfortunately this set, which is volume 4 in the Wallace series, is apparently the only one in which all four movies are presented in English-friendly versions (although I’m told that all of the sets include some movies with English subtitles). In any case this particular set is a must-buy if you’re a Wallace krimi fan.

Around the World Under the Sea (1966)

2011-09-18T07:23:00.006+10:00

Around the World Under the Sea falls into the category of harmless adventure movies. Not a classic but passable entertainment.

This 1966 movie was produced by Ivan Tors whose specialty was nature-based adventure TV series usually involving cute animals. Always very much G-rated and aimed mostly at kids but characterised by fairly spectacular photography (very spectacular by the standards of 1960s television).

Around the World Under the Sea has everything you’d expect in an Ivan Tors feature film - it’s family entertainment with no sex or violence, the special effects are pretty good, the acting is strictly B-movie standard, there are cameo appearances by cute animals and most of the movie takes place underwater.

The world has been rocked by an unusual number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and while there’s no way of preventing them it might be possible to minimise the devastation by providing early warning. The plan is to emplace fifty sensors at various places on the ocean floor, each sensor having a radio link to a central facility in Washington. A sophisticated research submarine capable of operating at extreme depths will be used to place the sensors. Doug Standish (Lloyd Bridges) is the hardbitten but idealistic scientist chosen to command the expedition.

He now sets about recruiting the other five members of the submarine’s crew, all experts in their fields. There’s Hank Stahl (Keenan Wynn), an expert in breathing devices, crusty but with a heart of gold. There’s Dr Craig Mosby, whose main qualification seems to be that he’s played by the star of Tors’ Flipper TV series. There’s computer wizard Dr Philip Volker (David McCallum), sporting huge horn-rimmed glasses so we’ll know he’s a scientist. There’s Dr Orin Hillyard, played by Marshal Thompson (another star from one of Tors’ TV series, in this case Daktari). And lastly there’s a medical expert, Dr Maggie Hanford (Shirley Eaton). You have to admire a girl who arrives on board a submarine where she’ll be the only woman crew member wearing a sexy dress and high heels.

Making a thrilling action adventure movie that has no bad guys and no monsters is always a challenge. This movie meets the challenge reasonably successfully. There are sufficient hazards to provide at least moderate excitement.

Of course one way to provide some drama would be to have the submarine’s crew of six include one beautiful glamorous woman, which is exactly what we have here. And no less than three crew members become hopelessly obsessed with the bodacious Maggie Hanford.

The other drama is provided by Dr Philip Volker. Movie scientists in that era were usually either idealistic heroes or crazed madmen, but Volker is a little different. He’s in it for the money. He only agreed to join the expedition on the condition that once the sensors have been placed he can borrow the submarine and the crew for a treasure hunt. He’s the closest thing the movie has to be a villain but he’s not really particularly villainous, he’s more of a likeable rogue.

Lloyd Bridges was a natural for a movie like this, being a veteran of 155 episodes of the underwater action adventure TV series Sea Hunt, as a result of which he’d become a fairly proficient scuba diver. And while he was never a good actor he always put so much enthusiasm into his performances that he rarely failed to entertain. Much the same can be said for Keenan Wynn. David McCallum seems vaguely amused by it all. Shirley Eaton as Maggie Hanford isn’t really a femme fatale, she just has a glamourous sexiness that drives male scientists crazy.

The best thing about this movie is that it was made in the mid-60s so it doesn’t try to ram political messages about the environment or sexism own our throats. It’s just a lightweight kids’ adventure film with a cool submarine, good special effects, very good underwater sequences and fun campy performances.

Unfortunately the print TCM screened is a very poor fullscreen version and this movie doesn’t seem to have had a DVD release. I have no idea if the out-of-print VHS release was fullscreen or not.

Planet of the Apes (1968)

2011-09-16T21:00:00.004+10:00

Planet of the Apes (the 1968 original of course, not the Tim Burton remake) is one of the most beloved science fiction movies of its era. While it’s certainly fun, it’s also a movie that shows its age rather badly.

Charlton Heston had mixed luck with science fiction movies. In the late 60s and early 70s he made quite a few and they were quite successful and pretty well thought of at the time. Sadly they haven’t stood the test of time very well. Soylent Green now seems embarrassing, and while The Omega Man is still a good deal of fun it’s definitely fun with an emphasis on camp.

All of Heston’s sci-fi movies of that period have this in common, that they captured the zeitgeist of the era remarkably well. And that’s their problem. They’re all imbued with that counter-culture radical-chic gloom-and-doom ethos. The world is always suffering some dreadful calamity, and you can bet It’s All Our Fault.

Planet of the Apes has an even bigger problem. Much of its impact comes from the Shock Ending, and by their nature such tricks only work once. Even worse the posters for the movie, and many of the video and DVD covers, revealed the Shock Ending. Of course it’s possible that we’re meant to know the secret while the protagonists don’t, so as to Heighten the Irony. It still doesn’t pack the same punch the second time you see it (and I think this is at least the third time I’ve seen this movie).

Everyone probably knows the plot, but here goes anyway. A spacecraft was launched from Earth in the early 1970s. Travelling at almost the speed of light the journey has taken just a few years for the crew, but on Earth two thousand years have elapsed. They’re on what they think is the return journey when they crash-land on an unknown planet. At first it seems to be desolate and uninhabited, but eventually they find life. But not quite as they expect it. The planet is inhabited by humans and by apes, but the apes are in charge and the humans are regarded as mere animals without intelligence. And without any rights. They’re basically livestock.

That offers the opportunity for lots of heavy-handed satire about our treatment of lesser species and our intellectual arrogance, etc, etc. And even more heavy-handed satire about religion, morality, etc, etc.

The spacecraft commander, Taylor (Charlton Heston), finds himself a captive of the apes. Luckily he’s in the custody of two idealistic and kindly scientists, Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter). They’re surprised to find themselves in possession of a talking animal, and even more surprised when he tells them he arrived on their planet in a spaceship, given that the ape scientists of this planet are convinced that flight is impossible, for men or apes.

The planet’s head scientist is also their guardian of religious truth (more opportunities here for heavy-handed satire) and he’s not happy at all about men who can talk. He plans to solve that little problem by firstly gelding and then lobotomising Taylor, but he forgets that if Taylor can talk he can also understand.

It probably sounds like I didn’t like this movie but in fact I’m quite fond of it. The 60s vibe is quite amusing, the makeup effects were dazzling in 1968 and are still quite impressive. This was no low-budget affair and there’s some spectacular location shooting.

It’s the acting that makes this picture work however. There’s nothing half-hearted about the performances. Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter play the chimpanzee scientists as if they really believed in the roles and it pays off. The performances are good enough to achieve the necessary suspension of disbelief.

And then of course there’s Charlton Heston. It’s easy to mock Heston for his outrageous over-acting but more often than not in his movies when Heston chewed the scenery that scenery needed to be chewed. There were certain roles that were just not going to work with anything less than a comprehensively over-the-top acting approach and this is one such role. It works, and Heston in full cry is a joy to behold.

This is the first movie I’ve ever seen in Blu-Ray. The British Blu-Ray release looks good although I’m still not sure Blu-Ray is worth the money or the hassle.

Queen of the Amazons (1947)

2011-09-14T14:00:00.006+10:00

Queen of the Amazons is one of those jungle adventure combined with exotic women movies that remained popular from the 1920s right through to the 60s, with a couple of late entries as recently as the 80s. The appeal was obvious - there was the promise of scantily clad women and “forbidden love” plus action and adventure. In fact they rarely delivered on most of these promises, but hope springs eternal in the hearts of movie-goers. And for the studios there was the advantage of being able to use huge amounts of stock footage, so they could be churned out for next to nothing.

This particular example dates from 1947 and was made by one of the Poverty Row studios that existed mainly to fill the insatiable demand for cheap B-movies. A young man has disappeared whilst on safari and since he was working undercover investigating ivory smuggling there is the suspicion he may have met with foul play. The usual miscellaneous group of adventurers - his girlfriend, his pal, his dad, a dotty scientist and a comic relief cook - set off to find him. There seems to be some confusion as to where this ill-fated safari took place they start their search in India but the action soon moves to Africa. Which gives the producers the chance to use stock footage of India as well as Africa!

As their journey progresses they hear rumours of a mysterious white woman ruling a lost kingdom of amazon women, and the rumours hint that she practises voodoo and possibly other wickedness as well. This amazon queen turns out to be not quite what they expected.

Surprisingly enough in the African sequences the stock footage actually features African animals. No tigers stalking the African plains in this one! Even more surprisingly the stock footage is generally at least vaguely relevant to the plot, and is integrated moderately well into the action. The acting is average B-movie standard, and the comic relief is less annoying than in most such movies.

In fact it’s a reasonably competent B-picture, with a fairly coherent plot. There’s some glamour and some action, and at only 61 minutes it feels less padded and better paced than most features of its type. If you’re a fan of this sort of thing (and I admit to having a bit of a soft spot for such movies) it provides adequate mounts of fun and enjoyment with a definite camp tinge to it.

The public domain print that I saw was actually quite decent, with perfectly acceptable image and sound quality.

Strip-Tease (1963)

2011-09-12T16:29:00.006+10:00

Strip-Tease (Sweet Skin) is a movie totally dominated by its star. Nico (billed in this movie as Krista Nico) had already achieved international success as a model and has appeared in several movies, most notably playing herself in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. She would of course achieve much greater fame a few years later singing with the Velvet Underground and would become a somewhat legendary figure before her death in 1988.

Most of her movie appearances were in experimental features such as Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls. Strip-Tease was by comparison much closer to being a mainstream movie. While the title suggests an exploitation movie this is a movie that takes itself fairly seriously.

Ariane (Nico) is a dancer in Paris who has finally got her big break, only to see it snatched away from her when a big name dancer is brought in at the last moment. Disillusioned, she abandons ballet. She is broke when she runs into an old acquaintance. Berthe, after changing her name to Dodo Voluptuous, has been making big money as a stripper. She suggests that Ariane might consider this as a career. Dodo has now married strip club owner Paul and he is willing to give Ariane her opportunity.

Paul comes up with an act for her. Since she’s so stiff and nervous she will play the part of a wooden puppet, stripping along with an actual puppet. Ariane’s first performance is almost a disaster when she loses her nerve but luckily Paul’s strip club is rather up-market and arty and the audience thinks her reluctance to shed her clothes is part of the act. She is hailed as a kind of genius of avant-garde performance-art strip-tease (this is Paris after all).

She is still not entirely comfortable in her new life. Her best friend is a black jazz/blues musician who runs a club named Sam’s. He is played by Big Joe Turner, in real life a legendary blues singer. He’s a kind of father figure to her, and tries to persuade her that the price for hew new-found success is too high.

When an old boyfriend is shocked to discover her new profession she defends herself by saying that she doesn’t take much off. He accuses her of hypocrisy, and after thinking about it she decides he’s right. That night she does her first full-fledged strip.

Ariane has meanwhile attracted the attention of wealthy playboy Jean-Loup. He is idle, fabulously wealthy, extravagant, pretentious and good-looking. She is drawn into an affair with him, but she will soon find out what he really thinks of her and she will have to decide what she now thinks of herself.

This is one of those sexy arty rather serious French films of that era that could easily end up taking itself too seriously for its own good. Surprisingly though it works rather well. The moody black-and-white cinematography and the atmosphere of sin, glamour, decadence, art and style makes for a fairly entertaining movie.

Even more surprisingly perhaps, its biggest strength is Nico’s acting. As you’d expect, given her later image, she’s mysterious and oddly detached but this works in her favour. She is playing an outsider, a woman who feels rather detached from her own life. She is of course a foreigner as well, a German in Paris, a kind of exile.

And of course she has that extraordinary exotic beauty.

The music is a highlight as well. Serge Gainsbourg not only wrote the music but also makes a cameo appearance. The title song was originally recorded by Nico herself, being in fact her first ever recording, but at the last moment it was decided to substitute a version sung by Juliette Greco.

This was the early 60s so there isn’t a huge amount of flesh on display although by 1963 standards it was pretty racy.

Mondo Macabro have done a fine job with the widescreen transfer and as usual they have provided some worthwhile extras.

A well-made movie, worth seeing for the atmosphere of early 60s Paris, for the music, and for Nico’s odd but effective performance.

Payment In Blood (1967)

2011-09-09T15:44:00.005+10:00

Payment In Blood (Sette winchester per un massacro) may not be one of the great spaghetti westerns but fans of the genre will still find plenty to enjoy.

In the aftermath of the American Civil War former Confederate officer Colonel Blake leads a gang of brigands in Texas just north of the Mexican border. They operate on both sides of the border and both the US and Mexican governments have put a price on their heads. Blake and his men like to give the impression they’re Confederate loyalists continuing the good fight against the damned Yankees but in reality they’re murdering cut-throats.

It seems as if time has run out for one of these bandits. Chamaco is about to be executed by a firing squad. Just in time a Mysterious Stranger appears and Chamaco is rescued. The Mysterious Stranger is named Stuart and he says he wants to join Blake’s gang. To take a stranger to Blake’s secret headquarters is against all the rules but then Stuart mentions that he just happens to know where the treasure of General P. G. T. Beauregard is buried. This much-rumoured fortune in gold disappeared in the closing days of the Clvil War and Blake has long cherished a desire to find it.

So Stuart gets to join Blake’s bandit gang. Blake doesn’t entirely trust him but he wants that gold. A plan is hatched. It will require the gang to get through a pass heavily guarded by US soldiers and then through the nearby town to reach the Indian cemetery where the treasure is hidden.

Of course there has to be a double-cross in there somewhere, and along the way there are ample opportunities for mayhem. There’s also a touch of romance, not something you necessarily expect in a spaghetti western. The beautiful Manuela claims to be as loyal to the Confederate cause as Blake but she causes considerable dissension. The other bandits believe that women and loot should be equally shared while Colonel Blake has decided that Manuela should be exclusively his. Manuela has ideas of her own as will soon become apparent.

As you expect from a spaghetti western there’s a great deal of violence. Everyone has unlimited ammunition which they expend lavishly, no-one ever has to stop to reload and the body count mounts steadily culminating in a huge gunfight which turns into a massacre.

Guy Madison walks off with the acting honours as Blake, giving a wonderfully cynical and vicious performance. Luisa Baratto is fiery and memorable as Manuela. Edd Byrnes as Stuart is the weak link - he just doesn’t seem mean enough or grungy enough.

Enzo G. Castellari’s energetic direction isn’t brilliant but it gets the job done. The climactic set-piece in the Indian tomb is certainly impressive.

This is another of the spaghetti western mystery DVDs I picked up recently in a bargain bin recently. There’s nothing on the discs or the cases to identify the company that released them but they’re NTSC discs so they’re obviously American imports. I assume they’re from Wild East productions since that company seems to be the only possibility. In any case they’re all, including this one, quite reasonable widescreen transfers. No extras, but appealingly cheap.

Don’t set your expectations too high for this one. Castellari is no Sergio Leone. If you approach it with that caveat in mind and you’re in the mood for a spaghetti western then you could do a lot worse.